Where Is The Lie? - Paperback

by C. J. Gold (Author)

Trust no one. It's the only rule Alessandra Bennett was ever given. It's why she's alone, why she can read a room in seconds, and why nobody knows about the illegal work she can't get out of.

Then she meets Freddie Kent.

A rare night off. A shadowy London pub. A famous actor who - impossibly - reads her the way she reads everyone else. They turn out to share more than one good night: old wounds, a certain slipperiness about labels, and secrets dangerous enough to get them both killed. Sandy tells herself he's a temporary escape from the threats closing in on her. But as the ghosts of her past catch up, Freddie might be the only person alive who can help her survive the week.

Where Is the Lie? is a romance with a spy-thriller edge - fast, funny and knife-edge tense, with a slow-burn love story at its centre and a heroine who has spent her whole life being someone else. Alessandra is Georgian-American, multilingual, displaced and grieving, and very good at surviving. What she has never done is tell one person the truth.

Sandy is queer and says so plainly. So does Freddie. So does much of the world around them. It is never the secret, never the obstacle and never the plot - just the ordinary weather of the book, in a story with room in it for everyone.

A novel about deception, identity and surveillance that turns out to be about trust. For readers of Ally Carter, Alison Cochrun and Rosalie Knecht - and for anyone who wants their Bourne with banter, their found family hard-won, and their heroine's whole self on the page.

Dedicated to everyone on the spectrum of queerness.

Content notes: grief, violence, queer content.