by Tanen Jones
Praise for The Better Liar
“[Tanen] Jones’s debut novel is clever, absorbing, and full of red herrings. No one is trustworthy…. A stunning twist ending will leave readers waiting to see what Jones will give them next.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Jones debuts with a taut, twisty thriller…. [She] sneakily builds suspense via a trio of narrators—Leslie, Mary, and Robin—none of them reliable…. Jones arrives with an undeniable splash.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A darkly complex relationship between two sisters lies at the heart of Jones’s debut psychological thriller…. A blistering debut from a promising new talent.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In this genuinely surprising novel, full of exacting observations, Jones layers the lies on thick to craft a propulsive narrative about motherhood, misery, and dysfunctional family dynamics. The Better Liar just keeps getting better and better and better.”
—CHANDLER BAKER, New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network
“Tanen Jones gives us two books: a cleverly crafted mystery that defies all guesswork and a compelling thought piece on the complexity of family relationships. The Better Liar is the best type of fiction—a fast-paced read that will leave you thinking long after you turn the final page.”
—CHRISTINA DALCHER, bestselling author of Vox
“The Better Liar is a knockout—a stunner of a debut that left me in awe of this new writer’s talent. It’s smart, fresh, twisty, and compelling, with utterly believable characters, gorgeous prose, and a storyline that kept me guessing until the final pages. You know a book is good when you wish you’d written it!”
—KAREN DIONNE, internationally bestselling author of The Marsh King’s Daughter
“The Better Liar is a dark, intriguing exploration of family wounds and the fragility of identity. Following Jones’s complex protagonists through the bleak landscape of Albuquerque, the reader gets sucked into the ever-deepening layers and grim desires that pit these women against each other while drawing them—and us—inevitably closer to the painful truth. The Better Liar is gritty, pacy, and full of hard questions about inheritance and femininity.”
—CAITE DOLAN-LEACH, author of Dead Letters and We Went to the Woods
“I thought I’d just skim a page or two before putting The Better Liar on my to-read shelf, but I couldn’t help becoming so drawn in that I had to keep going. Tanen Jones has written a compulsively page-turning story. She cleverly drip-feeds nuggets of information, each more surprising than the last, until the final shocking revelation.”
—CLAIRE FULLER, author of Bitter Orange and Swimming Lessons
“All great thriller writers have to be good liars, and Tanen Jones absolutely is. Her debut is a scorching, fascinating read about a dark relationship that will make you turn the mirror onto yourself. The Better Liar is binge-worthy all night long.”
—JULIA HEABERLIN, internationally bestselling author of Black-Eyed Susans
“I can hardly believe The Better Liar is a debut novel—it has three unreliable narrators and a twisty plot, and it dives deep into complicated family relationships. I was consumed by this irresistible thriller from the first page right up to that whopper of an ending. Tanen Jones is a confident and gifted storyteller—I can’t wait for her next book.”
—JENNIFER HILLIER, author of Jar of Hearts, ITW Thriller Award winner for best novel
“The Better Liar is a gorgeously dark tale of twisted sisterhood—and a gutsy spin on the psycho-thriller. Nicely done, Tanen Jones!”
—DEBRA JO IMMERGUT, author of The Captives
“A twisty, fast-paced read with a sly sense of humor and an engine that won’t quit, The Better Liar is emotionally surprising and deeply moving, making it a perfect book-club choice. Smart, sinister, and utterly engrossing—this debut delivers.”
—JOSHILYN JACKSON, New York Times bestselling author of Never Have I Ever
“A tale of two dangerous women in a toxic embrace that winds relentlessly tighter, The Better Liar is a brilliantly claustrophobic thriller with a gasp-inducing sting in the tail—tense, controlled, and masterly.”
—CHRISTOBEL KENT, author of What We Did
“With a gritty, suspenseful story unspooling in gorgeous prose, Jones expertly ramps up the tension and then delivers twists and turns at breakneck speed. This is an impressive debut, with an ending you won’t see coming.”
—ELIZABETH KLEHFOTH, author of All These Beautiful Strangers
“Jones’s sharp debut is an expertly plotted, gritty thriller rooted in the sun-bleached landscapes of New Mexico. This dangerous story of sisterhood and inheritance will make you question how well you really know those closest to you.”
—MADELINE STEVENS, author of Devotion
“The Better Liar is a dazzling debut that weaves a haunting past into a dangerous plan. Tanen Jones shifts effortlessly between narrators and storylines, and delivers one hell of a twist. I couldn’t wait to finish but did not want it to end. This is the best kind of thriller!”
—WENDY WALKER, internationally bestselling author of The Night Before
The Better Liar is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Tanen Jones
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Averno” from Poems 1962–2012 by Louise Glück, copyright © 2012 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jones, Tanen, author.
Title: The better liar: a novel / Tanen Jones.
Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019034777 (print) | LCCN 2019034778 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984821225 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781984821249 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3610.O6299 B48 2020 (print) | LCC PS3610.O6299 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2019034777
LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2019034778
Ebook ISBN 9781984821249
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Scott Biel and Belina Huey
Cover images: Rekha Garton/Trevillion Images (woman on left), Ysbrand Cosijn/Trevillion Images (woman on right), Magdalena Wasiczek/Trevillion Images (roses)
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue: Robin
Chapter 1: Leslie
Chapter 2: Leslie
Chapter 3: Leslie
Chapter 4: Robin
Chapter 5: Mary
Chapter 6: Leslie
Chapter 7: Mary
Chapter 8: Mary
Chapter 9: Robin
Chapter 10: Mary
Chapter 11: Leslie
Chapter 12: Mary
Chapter 13: Robin
Chapter 14: Leslie
Chapter 15: Mary
Chapter 16: Leslie
Chapter 17: Robin
Chapter 18: Mary
Chapter 19: Leslie
Chapter 20: Robin
Chapter 21: Mary
Chapter 22: Mary
Chapter 23: Leslie
Chapter 24: Mary
Chapter 25: Robin
Chapter 26: Mary
Chapter 27: Leslie
Chapter 28: Mary
Chapter 29: Mary
Chapter 30: Mary
Chapter 31: Robin
Chapter 32: Mary
Chapter 33: Mary
Chapter 34: Mary
Chapter 35: Leslie
Chapter 36: Robin
Chapter 37: Leslie
Chapter 38: Mary
Chapter 39: Leslie
Chapter 40: Robin
Chapter 41: Leslie
Chapter 42: Mary
Chapter 43: Mary
Chapter 44: Leslie
Chapter 45: Leslie
Chapter 46: Mary
Chapter 47: Robin
Chapter 48: Mary
Chapter 49: Leslie
Chapter 50: Robin
Chapter 51: Leslie
Chapter 52: Leslie
Chapter 53: Robin
Chapter 54: Leslie
Chapter 55: Robin
Chapter 56: Leslie
Epilogue: Robin
Dedication
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Nothing is safe.
You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.
Like the field, the one that burned.
Afterward, the girl was gone.
Maybe she didn’t exist,
we have no proof either way.
All we know is:
the field burned.
—LOUISE GLÜCK, “AVERNO”
PROLOGUE
Robin
Like most of the dead, I want to be remembered.
The lucky dead leave ghosts of themselves everywhere: an impression on a mattress, a name in the mouth. My name has almost disappeared now.
Robin Voigt—my old boss said it this year, going through the tax folder for the fiscal year 2011–2012, preparing to throw it out. It was one in a list: Krista Ungert, Maria Villanueva, Robin Voigt. My face rose up briefly before him, half-remembered; I had reminded him of his daughter.
Robin Voigt, written in eight-point font underneath my name in the yearbook. Kevin Borrego’s youngest daughter smeared her finger over my face. Who’s that? she asked. She’s pretty. Kevin said, Oh, Robin. She was a couple years below me. I think she moved away.
Robin, in script high on my ex-boyfriend’s inner arm, so that I pressed into the ripe furry creases of his armpit, pocked with eczemic scars.
Flimsy, shitty ghosts. I’m fading.
The only people who can keep you alive are the ones who loved you. Not the ones who panted after you, bought you flowers, thumbed your nipples. I mean the ones who saw your disgusting insides and loved you anyway. The people who really knew you.
I only had one person like that. Leslie, my sister.
My ghost wakes up with her in the morning, chews on her hair like I used to when we were children. It holds her hand at night. I’ll never leave her. No one loved me more than Leslie. She loved me so much she sat my ghost up and breathed into it, made it walk around our home again, the way the living do. She bound herself to me a long time ago, but she won’t say my name aloud anymore.
If I tell you how it happened, maybe you’ll remember me as well.
Maybe you’ll say my name to each other, a little chant, like a dirge.
1
Leslie
By the time I found her she was dead.
I groped for somewhere to sit down. The only place other than the bed, where the body lay, was a wooden dining-room chair half-buried under a pile of wrinkled clothes. It had a cushion hanging off the seat, patterned with cartoon bees, and as I moved to straighten it a cockroach, startled by the movement, hurried up the chair leg. I jerked my hand back and closed my eyes. Then I opened them again—helplessly.
I didn’t want to look at the body. The body—Robin—Rachel. I’d never seen her as an adult, but as a teenager she’d been round-faced, milk-fed. Now she was so thin as to be impossible to look at. My vision unfocused itself when it encountered her ribs, visible through both the fabric of her RUNNIN’ REBELS T-shirt and the sheet in which most of her body below the shoulders was tangled. Her hipbones, too, projected, cradling the vacant, starved abdomen.
A little vomit had dried in the corner of her mouth and on her tongue, the color of burned things. She had been unconscious when she’d choked on it.
Iker was panicking. “Should I call the police?” he said, directing his gaze at the close yellow walls, the popcorn ceiling. “I’m really sorry about this, I’m so sorry. I’ll call the police. I’ll call.” He wore a white polo with the logo of the housing company on it. Crescent-shaped sweat stains gathered underneath his sagging pectoral muscles, like a pair of closed eyes. They twitched as he began digging in the pockets of his khaki pants for his cellphone.
“No,” I said, trying to think fast. “No, I’ll call. You go outside. I just want—” I swallowed. “I just want to be with her for a minute.”
“Yeah,” Iker said, wiping his upper lip. “Okay. Okay. I’ll wait. Outside. I’ll be…” He pointed. “I’ll be right down there if you need me.”
He went down the stairs into the living room below, taking his proprietor’s key but leaving the door ajar. After a minute I could hear him shuffling on the front porch, audible through the mosquito screen on the open window.
She was still on the bed. The fact of her was as sweltering as the room.
In my imagination I reached for my phone. In another version, I didn’t. I lived these two visions simultaneously for several long minutes, my hand twitching in the air above my purse, unable to choose between them.
If I called the police, then Robin would be dead—absolutely dead. Legally, governmentally dead. I would have to identify her, and arrange somehow to take her body back to Albuquerque to be buried, and have a funeral, and then everyone would know she was dead and it would be over.
I could contest, maybe—but contesting could take a year or more. I couldn’t wait a year. If I didn’t call the police, then she would still be dead, but—
I took her wallet off the dresser and looked at her ID. “Rachel Vreeland” stared out at me from the hypersaturated photograph. She’d been pretty as an adult, the pale skin I remembered from childhood turned slightly orange by the sun or the DMV’s printer. 5’-09”, the text next to her face said. Eyes: BRO.
Her real name wasn’t anywhere in the wallet, or anywhere in the rest of the room. She had a lot of stuff, but most of it was clothes, strewn across the floor and piled in the closet. I picked through the items with pockets, careful of cockroaches, but turned up only old movie tickets and gas-station receipts. The walls were covered in movie posters and a corkboard with photographs of friends with red Solo cups, a scruffy orange cat, a long-lost boyfriend from whenever the last time was she was weighty enough to crush to his side while he held the camera out in front of them. The dresser
drawers held dozens of bottles of disintegrating nail polish and depleted pans of eye shadow. At least fifty pairs of underwear, which I pushed aside with a clothes hanger, scraping the bottom of the drawer: nothing underneath.
I shook out each of her shoes next—cowboy boots, Toms, slip-on sneakers—turning the left and then the right upside down.
Something fell out of the right one. I’d been expecting Robin’s real ID, or maybe a baggie, so the anticlimax startled me: a pair of pearl earrings, so light that they made barely any noise against the carpeted floor. For a moment I thought they must be insects, moths, alive inside Robin’s shoes, and their brief bouncing trajectory across the floor was translated by my gaze as mad, frenzied flapping; then I blinked, and they resolved into dead objects.
It took me several seconds to realize why I was staring at them. When it came to me I snatched them up so quickly that my fingernails scraped the carpet. My mother’s earrings. Five-pointed, like stars, each seed grasped by a minuscule gold claw. I hadn’t seen them since I was a little girl. I suppose I thought they’d been buried with her, or my father had sold them. But here they were in Robin’s cramped rented room in Las Vegas.
Had Daddy given them to her and never told me?