Never read a book under time pressure from your boss, more like. Never Lie is a book that scores points for having the twist not being quite what you expect it to be, but when the twists are almost too outlandish to see coming, is that really a positive?

Tricia and her red flag of a husband, Ethan, drive out to a house inspection during a blizzard, and get snowed in. What Tricia doesn’t realise is that the house that they’re inspecting belonged to the famed psychologist Adrienne Hale, who mysteriously disappeared a few years ago … and it’s being sold as it was at the time of her disappearance. It doesn’t take long to realise that the house is lousy with secret passages.

We’ve been lousy with unreliable narrators for at least fifteen years now; it is unclear if Freida McFadden knows how to write one. For any of these twists to work she would either have needed present tense alternating narrators or a third person remove, because the way that Tricia doles out her revelations makes no sense.

Never Lie is compulsive reading in that you want to know what happens next because you’re goggling at it, but the concept of being snowed in at a real estate listing for a weekend and wearing a missing person’s clothes and eating the fresh food in the fridge (even though the property has been vacant for three years, the estate agent had stocked up on cold cuts) is an instant stumbling block. Never Lie is stupid and undemanding, designed to be knocked over almost instantaneously. But you don’t have to. You really don’t have to.