Lie With Me

"The main character is a very dislikable man called Paul Morris. I always love a dislikable main character and he is despicable right from the word go. He’s an egomaniac, he’s misogynistic and vain. He’s free-loading and convinced of the powers of his own charm in all situations. So, we start off absolutely detesting him and yet, by the end of it, bizarrely, we’re rooting for him. And it’s because, over the course of the book, he stays true to himself and his integrity remains intact— whereas we gradually realize that the people around him are the ones who lack integrity, because they’re not what they purport to be. Paul Morris gets himself invited along on a holiday. He fancies a summer holiday in a Greek villa that he doesn’t have to pay for. He quite fancies the hostess and thinks he’s in with a chance. So, he happily goes off to Pyros, this island where ten years before he had gone on a drunken bender that he doesn’t remember very much about. He goes back there and happily freeloads in this lovely villa with this family. He starts off feeling like he’s in control, that he is the one manipulating events, but as the book unfolds we realise that actually he’s the one being manipulated and our sympathies switch. It transpires that the drunken bender he was on with friends ten years before is going to come back to haunt him. There’s the historic disappearance of a young girl from that time and then there’s something that happens to another young girl in the present day."