Lisa Jackson's Liar, Liar opens with a woman dressed as Marilyn Monroe plunging from a hotel window, and I found myself asking: why does this feel like a character study masquerading as a thriller?
I was elbow-deep in a lamb biryani — the kind that takes three hours and requires you to forget you have a phone — when Brittany Pressley's voice pulled me into this tangled web of Didi Storm's toxic narcissism and the wreckage she leaves behind. Good timing, honestly. This book demands that your hands are busy but your brain is locked in.
Didi Storm Is the Most Interesting Person Who Barely Appears
Here's what Jackson gets right: Didi is a masterclass in narcissistic personality disorder rendered through other people's memories. Ex-beauty queen, Vegas celebrity impersonator, a woman who literally built her life around being someone else — and then she vanishes, leaving behind newborn twins she's apparently distributed like party favors. The protagonist, Remmi, exhibits classic parentification — she's the child who became the adult because her mother never could be one. That dynamic? Psychologically, it tracks. That same suffocating family architecture — secrets passed down like inheritance, children warped by the adults who were supposed to protect them — is doing serious work in House of a Thousand Candles too, though it wraps the dysfunction in gothic atmosphere rather than Vegas glitter. The way Remmi oscillates between desperate loyalty and rage toward Didi is exactly what the research shows about children of narcissistic parents. Jackson understands human nature on that front.
But. And this is a significant but.
The book is thirteen hours long, and somewhere around hour seven, I started wondering if the plot was also impersonating something — specifically, a tighter thriller with about four fewer subplots. There's Noah the PI ex-crush. There's a detective named Dani Settler. There's the mystery of the twins, the mystery of the body that isn't Didi, various suspects with increasingly convoluted motives. Jackson throws a LOT at the wall. Some of it sticks. Some of it slides.
When Clichés Collide with Genuine Psychology
This is a fascinating case study in a book fighting itself. On one hand, Jackson creates genuinely unsettling family dynamics — the idea that someone watched Remmi hand over a baby to a stranger in a parking lot and nobody believed the fifteen-year-old who witnessed it? That's real. That's how systems fail children. On the other hand, the romance subplot between Remmi and Noah feels pulled from a template. He's brooding. She's guarded. They have unresolved tension from high school. My therapist would have thoughts about a woman falling for the guy she had a crush on at fifteen while simultaneously investigating her mother's disappearance, and none of those thoughts would be encouraging.
The twists involving the family's past range from genuinely surprising to "wait, really?" — and I won't spoil which is which. But I will say that when the final reveal landed, I felt like I'd earned it through sheer endurance rather than elegant misdirection. Jackson is plotting a chess game on multiple boards simultaneously, and some of those boards didn't need to exist.
Pressley Carries What the Plot Can't
Here's the thing — Brittany Pressley is doing heavy lifting. That wry drawl the AudioFile review mentions? It's real, and it's the difference between this being a slog and being listenable. She's got this cool, slightly detached tone that works perfectly for a story where everyone is lying. When she shifts into Didi's voice — more breathless, more performative — you can hear the narcissism. Character differentiation through vocal affect. That's not easy with a cast this size.
Pressley turns the complex timeline (jumping between Remmi at fifteen and Remmi as an adult) into something you can actually follow without rewinding every ten minutes. I won't say the narration saves the book, but it definitely prevented me from switching to a podcast during the slower stretches.
Who's Going to Love This (and Who Should Walk Away)
If you're a Lisa Jackson fan who wants a long, layered family-secrets thriller and you don't mind some genre conventions along the way — this is solid. If you're someone who needs tight, economical plotting (hi, that's me), you'll be checking the progress bar. The psychology of the mother-daughter dynamic is genuinely interesting. The rest is competent but overextended.
At 1.25x speed, this becomes a much better experience. I'm not being glib — the pacing genuinely benefits from a slight acceleration.
The Case File, Closed
Psychologically honest in its core family dynamics, frustratingly padded everywhere else. Pressley's performance is the reason to go audio over print. But I finished it the way I finish a meal that was slightly too large — satisfied enough, wishing someone had exercised a little editorial restraint.
