A single cryptic text, "I need you," reunites four friends in the stippled light of an English seaside village just as surely as it signals readers that they're in the hands of a pro. Ware sets her psychological puzzle in a crumbling old mill on the Reach, where a marshy river meets the glimmering sea. It's the home of Kate, who summons her old friends Isa, Thea and Fatima when the discovery of a human bone in the shifting sand threatens to reveal misdeeds from their boarding-school days 17 years earlier. Ware further complicates the guessing game with the disclosure that the teenagers once played a game of their own invention, awarding points for telling convincing lies to taunt their classmates. Now the former clique must separate truth from deception as the stakes ratchet higher amid the growing possibility that someone close to them has committed murder. "A lie," says the narrator, Isa, no slouch at the game. "I'd almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening." Capable as she is, Ware hasn't worked out all the kinks of believability. Would Isa, a hyperprotective new mother, keep returning to the creepy mill with her baby as threats mount, the electricity fails and the sea threatens to swallow any route of escape? But for the most part, "The Lying Game" makes good on its premise that tall tales have consequences, especially when they're exposed to the glare of truth.

Imogen Church's convincing range of accents, modulations, and control allow her to voice multiple viewpoints adroitly, proving to be more effective than many full-cast recordings. Ware's newest features an ensemble, this time four friends whose boarding school bonds have frayed since becoming adults with separate lives. Isa is a new mother on leave from civil service lawyer-ing. When she receives an abrupt "I need you" text from Kate, an artist who never left the coastal village where the girls met, Isa immediately heads to remote Salten. Isa knows Fatima, a doctor whose headscarf declares her rededication to her Muslim faith, and Thea, a casino worker who's perhaps as troubled now as she was then, will also be there. Reunited at the Mill house, once the quartet's home-away-from-home, Kate divulges that a corpse was discovered in the nearby marshes. The "lying game," which kept the girls' secrets buried for almost 20 years, is finally up. These four frightened, threatened women must figure out which confessions might save the rest of their lives. VERDICT For Ware fans, this is Game on. ["Though not as chill-inducing as her previous titles, Ware's latest offers nuanced characters, an atmospheric small-town British setting, and a satisfying mystery": LJ 6/15/17 review of the Scout: S. & S. hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.