The Book:
Bald-Faced Liar by Victoria Helen Stone
Published June 1, 2025 by Lake Union Publishing
Date read: June 2, 2025
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Bald-Faced Liar spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
Elizabeth and all her alter egos
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
Traveling nurse Elizabeth May has a promising new home in Santa Cruz. And another new identity. It’s a pattern of reinvention for a woman escaping her traumatic childhood—and hiding from the decades of notoriety and destruction that followed. Invisibility has kept Elizabeth safe. Until now. After all these years, someone sees her for who she is.
Threat by threat, a vengeful stalker is dismantling Elizabeth’s carefully constructed lifetime of lies. And no one in her temporary circle can be trusted—not her fleeting new love interest, not the supportive friend she knows only from online forums, and certainly not the police. They’ve never been there for her.
As fear sharpens to terror, Elizabeth soon discovers something about her past that even she didn’t know. The revelation could finally set her on a path of healing and redemption. Or, now alone in the dark, it could be Elizabeth’s worst nightmare.
Bald-Faced Liar Spoilers
The Reveal:
Tristan, Elizabeth’s internet friend, was the stalker. His real name was Noah, and he was the brother of Jacob Hoffholder. He was stalking Elizabeth to avenge Jacob’s death.
As a kid, Elizabeth had been involved in a satanic panic scandal at a daycare, and had testified against the Hoffholders that they had been abusing the children of the daycare. She was five, and didn’t really know what she was saying. She recanted her story a few years later, and the Hoffholders went free.
While the satanist accusations were just that, the Hoffholders had been abusing Jacob. He had started the satanist lie to get away from them, so when Lauren and Elizabeth recanted and his parents were released, Jacob was returned to their custody and abused even worse.
I believe Jacob had died by suicide three years before the events of the book. Noah then went looking for Lauren and Elizabeth–Elizabeth discovered that he had killed Lauren and made it look like suicide.
The Ending:
When Noah finally showed up at Elizabeth’s house in person, he tied her up and told her the whole story. He had been renting the upstairs unit in her rental, disguising himself as a woman to go by her cameras, and moving throughout the house to access Elizabeth’s unit through an old boarded up staircase. Elizabeth managed to get away and kill him, but passed out before she could call the cops. Instead she called her landlord when she woke up, who had moblike connections, and who helped her dispose of the body rather than have cops sniffing around his place.
Elizabeth got away with everything and kept dating Mike. She decided to stay in Santa Cruz despite all her lies.
I hope these Bald-Faced Liar spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
This was a reasonably interesting summer binge. I love stalker thrillers. I do feel like this book fell into the trap that nine out of ten books about characters with shady pasts fall into, but it was a quick, bingeable read with a nice setting. The way things played out with the MC’s landlord was amusing, if not entirely believable!
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