'NEVER TELL A LIE' IS HONESTLY FUN
“NEVER TELL A LIE’ IS FUN AS A SUSPENSE BOOK
By Sam Bauman
“Never Tell a Lie,” a suspense-mystery novel by Halle Ephron, is a nicely done work where the heroine is a nine-month pregnant woman who’s husband is set up as a murderer. It all rolls along nicely with plenty of clues for the modestly observant reader.
Ivy is the pregnant lady and David is the garden designer husband. It starts with a large lawn sale by Ivy and David as they clean out their new old house. A former classmate appears and is a cloying problem that Ivy shuffles off to David, who takes her into the house, where she used to play as a child.
Then Melinda White, the old classmate, disappears and David is suspected of doing away with her. Not that it all makes a lot of sense, but Ephron (any relation to movie director Nora Ephron?) Plugs into plenty of significant clues along the way. In a way these “clues” are a bit heavy handed, but it’s fun to pick them up and see how they all work out.
This is a 272-pager, nicely short of the mammoth books being peddled these days, and Ephron is a mystery reviewer at the Boston Globe, one of the few papers still reviewing books. Seems she got some fine ideas in her job, and this is a good example of the genre. It’s in the new books section of the Carson Library.