Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
The premise of the book drew me in but once I started reading it, I just couldn’t get into it at all.

Kit finds lots of secrets, lies. and twists when she decides to look into the death of her friend Shea, a woman who seemed so happy. This might seem familiar in spots but Diskin does a good job with the characters and she keeps you guessing. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A good read.

Loved this book! So many twists and turns, great character development too. It was really easy to get into, follow and understand. It is a brilliantly written book and i really enjoyed it. What's not to love about mystery and friendship?

This one took me by surprise!
When Shea Walker is found dead in a bath pumped full of intoxicants, no one can believe the bubbly mum took her own life. But how else do you explain finding her this way?
Kat Burrows, a close friend who moved away a few months before Shea's death, comes back for her funeral, and finds her disbelief around Shea's apparent suicide reflected in everyone who knew Shea. Kat decides to delve into the circumstances leading up to Shea's death, and finds her seemingly perfect life is laced with secrets Kat could never have imagined.
The story is intricate and has a great cast of well fleshed out characters with secrets of their own. You're left constantly guessing - the author gives you enough info to set the cogs whirring in your brain, trying to piece together the mystery, but withholds enough to deliver blows you didn't see coming. Overall, a great mystery with characters with depth and an overall story that keeps you wanting to read on!

This is a quick read - great for a summer vacation.

What truly happened? Did Shea kill herself? Or could it have been something else?

We all lie - but how far can they go? That's the question circling here as we explore the circle of friends through different points of views. What happened in the past? Did those secrets affect them now? Did those secrets affect Shea's death?

If you like character driven reads, and friends playing amateur detective, this one may be for you.
If you have to like all the characters in a book...this one may not be for you.

Overall, it was a fun read, but I likely won't remember it in a few years.

This was a really great read that kept me wondering and guessing right until the very last page. Would highly recommend!

Great story by E.C. Diskin. Really fabulous story, that kept me turning the pages!! A thrilling plot, and characters.

This wasn’t my favorite so I didn’t write a full review but thanks for the opportunity! I just found it to be a bit slow and I think the authors style just isn’t for me.

I'd like to thank Netgalley for the opportunity to read this ebook in exchange for an honest review. This book was a quick read and I really enjoyed it. I could really relate to the empty nest feelings that these mothers are dealing with (even though I'm not quite there yet). They really did keep a lot of secrets from each other, which in turn makes for a great story. It kept me wondering and wanting to just read one more chapter to see where things were going! Good read for anyone who likes a good suspense story!

Depth of Lies was a captivating thrill ride! Buckle up and prepare for the twists and turns!

The girls are back in town. Unfortunately it is for their dear friend, Shea's funeral. All of Shea's girlfriends are shocked and devastated but none more than Kat, Shea's closest friend, Kat cannot accept the idea from their mutual friends that Shea took her own life. Shea lit up a room and had a beautiful family and loving husband, didn't she? Kat takes it upon herself to try to retrace Shea's last days in order to find out exactly what happened to her best friend. She WAS her best friend, wasn't she? This is what Kat wonders when, throughout her personal investigation, she is shocked to find what secrets that, not only Shea held close to her but also those of their dearest friends.

E.C. Diskin does a magical job of of writing in such a way that you can see every person, place and situation with such clarity that it is so easy to lose yourself in the words and become a part of this satisfyingly dysfunctional group of friends!

Simply put, Depth of Lies unwraps deliciously like the engrossing, shocking thriller of a gift that it is and gives you the mouth-drop-OMG moment you are looking for!

Thank you to Netgalley, the publishers Thomas and Mercer and E.C. Diskin for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though it does not fit my usual genre of book.
The story and characters had me gripped from the start. Would recommend.

Overall, this was an ok read for me. I enjoyed the premise and secretive friends vibe. How well do you really know your friends is an intriguing hook. I thought the pace in the beginning and end was good but the middle seemed to drag for me. As for the characters, I liked Kat and I could understand her desire to find out what happened to her friend Shea. Was it a suicide or murder? I especially liked the setting of the lake they went back to. I thought the emotional entanglements of the friends worked really well to keep the tension steady. What I didn't enjoy and this is a personal preference, is the use of flashbacks. I find flashbacks unnecessary and for they disrupted the flow of the story

Shea dies and the secrets come out. Was she suicidal or murdered? How well do these friends really know each other? Infidelity and fresh starts pepper this story of suburbia swinging but it never quite hits its mark.

Provided by publisher.

Domestic suspense is quickly turning into my absolute favorite genre and Depth of Lies definitely fits this bill! A twisty, turny, unputdownable read. Once you pick this book up, you won't be able to let it go till the last page. Read this one, stat!

This one took me forever to get through. I was intrigued enough to finish it, but it felt very slow-moving to me, and I didn't really care about any of the characters at all. When the truth came out, it was disappointing and flat. Not a winner in my book.

Depth of Lies is an examination of the life of a woman, post-mortem, by her best friend who refuses to believe that she would deliberately end it all.





The death of Shea Walker in a bathtub in an inn on an island far from home comes as a shock to her friends and family. No one can believe that this feisty, vivacious woman would choose to die.



Hoping to both honour and celebrate her memory, Shea’s friends, Kat, Tori, Lina, Evelyn and Dee meet at Tori’s holiday home where they once enjoyed great getaways. Only Georgia is too distraught to join them. As they swap stories about Shea, Kat, who had moved to Texas several months earlier, realises that there were many secrets and lies that swirled around Shea, and that it seems as if she hardly knew her or any of her friends.



Kat, Shea’s closest neighbour and friend of 20 years, cannot understand these secrets, relating to the state of Shea’s marriage, her cheating husband, Ryan, and Shea’s own one night stand in response. On the island, Shea had flirted with a married man, Blake, who later that night died in a boating accident.



But Kat has a secret of her own. She cannot admit to the others that Shea had called her the night before she died and that she had ignored the call. Feeling guilty, Kat feels driven to find out more about her friend, believing that Shea was in distress, yet refusing to believe that her death was anything but an accident.







The story is written in the 3rd person past tense point of view of Kat and Shea. Kat’s narrative in the present time is interspersed with flashbacks from Shea’s life, four months before her death. Besides the story of Kat’s amateurish search for the truth, we also get to see the narrative of Shea and Ryan, of how Shea gamely held on to the marriage, hoping to keep it alive while Ryan strayed.



The story follows two timelines, Kat’s from April 8, when she comes to Maple Park for Shea’s funeral up to April 14, as she seeks to find out whether her friend’s death was an accident or murder. The book opens with Shea’s death on April 1, then goes back in time to November 24 the previous year when her life seems to be crumbling, leading up to her death.





Be warned – the pace is far from breathtaking. And while the mystery of what happened to Shea remains, this novel is more about relationships and the ensuring drama than it is about the death.



This drama caused the story to feel too long drawn, with Kat having her own set of issues with husband Mack complicating her life.





The author does a great job of bringing out the camaraderie between the women. This part sounded truest for me. But then we realise, that even in a group of girlfriends who’ve shared great times, the intensity of friendships changes over time. Little by little, the simmering tensions come to the surface. It was this element that kept me reading.



Nearly everyone in the book appears to be grappling with their own ifs and buts relating to Shea’s death, wondering if there was anything they could have done to prevent her death.



As the one who moved out of Ohio, Kat is the one most perfectly suited to sift through the lies and find the truth.



While the plot was entirely plausible, it would have benefited from tighter editing. Even though Shea dies on April 1, and the mystery is resolved on the 14th, it seems way too long.





But there were things I found annoying. There were portions when the conversations felt stilted and unreal, not like the way real people talk. I also found it odd that the women were all so easily blown away whenever a good-looking man complimented them and flirted with them.


The phrase, Ryan had a tell, was totally weird.



Kat too was annoying. There were several occasions when she seemed incapable of good judgement, of keeping her mouth shut.





The title was most apt. Kat sinks in deeper into the lies, wondering if she ever knew these people, much like Shea sank deeper into the water and met her end.

E.C. Diskin’s Depth of Lies is a gripping, fast-paced thriller that will not only keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time you’re reading, but it will also make you question how much you really know about the people that you consider yourself closest to.

The story opens with a mysterious death. Shea Walker, a happy, easy going mom, who is beloved by all around her, is found dead in a bathtub at a B&B. An empty pill bottle is found in her room so everyone believes that she has unexpectedly ended her own life. All of Shea’s friends are of course distraught because they have lost their friend and because they simply cannot fathom how Shea could have possibly killed herself without any of them realizing she was at such a low point in her life.

One of Shea’s oldest and closest friends, Kat Burrows, takes it a step further. She absolutely refuses to believe that Shea killed herself and suspects foul play. She decides to do a little amateur sleuthing on her own, along with their mutual friend Tori. Kat is also wracked with guilt because on the night she died, Shea had tried to call Kat but Kat chose not to answer the phone.

Once Kat starts digging, she begins to uncover lie after lie, and seemingly endless secrets and betrayals. More and more details emerge that make Kat realize she didn’t know Shea nearly as well as she thought she did. Nor did she really know anyone in their circle of friends, for that matter. What she finds not only makes her question the truth about what happened to Shea that night, but it also makes her take a hard look at everyone around her.

The aptly named Depth of Lies explores the questions of not only what really happened to Shea Walker but also the thought provoking question of ‘Do we ever really know everything about anyone?’

LIKES

I thought the author very effectively used the structure of the novel to unravel the mystery of what happened to Shea. The story is presented to the reader in alternating chapters from the point of view of both Shea and Kat. We get to follow the last few months of Shea’s life and see what is really going on with her, while at the same time, we follow Kat as she is investigating Shea’s death. The two storylines parallel each other until they ultimately merge into one as both Kat and the reader learn the truth about Shea’s death.

I also thought the pacing was fantastic. I got hooked immediately and with each clue Kat and her friend uncovered, the suspense just kept building and building. I also liked the added tension of having Kat’s spouse as well as all of her friends start to get agitated because she keeps asking so many questions and won’t let anything go. Wanting to know if any of them were hiding anything made the story that much more compelling for me and I devoured the novel in less than two days because I just had to know the truth.

Not only is Depth of Lies a well-crafted mystery that will keep you on the edge of your seat, but it also does a wonderfully realistic job of portraying the different relationships between the characters. We get to see all of the lingering guilt between the friends because they feel like they weren’t there for Shea, but then on top of it, the more the friends talk after her death, the more we start to see little bits of resentment and anger toward Shea come to the surface. They might be mourning her loss, but a few of them clearly have emotional baggage when it comes to the impact Shea had on their lives.

I also found the relationships realistic in terms of the novel’s central question of how well we really know someone. I found this idea especially believable and relatable. Don’t we all tend to keep certain things to ourselves? I know as much as I love my friends and family, I still don’t tell them everything. I think it’s normal to keep secrets, especially if those secrets are things that could be really embarrassing if they were to become known. This aspect of the novel left me with a lot to think about in terms of my own little secrets and in terms of what my friends and loved ones might be keeping from me.

DISLIKES/ISSUES

The only real issue I had with Depth of Lies was that I would have liked to have felt more connected to the main characters. I was glued to the book to find out the truth about Shea and whether or not Kat would alienate her entire friend group because she just wouldn’t let it go, but otherwise, I didn’t really feel all that attached to any of the characters. I usually like to feel some kind of connection to at least one character but instead I just felt like an outsider observing the lives of these women and their spouses. It definitely didn’t impede my enjoyment of the story, which I thought was fantastic, but I think that’s what makes it a 4 star instead of a 5 star read for me.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you’re looking for a fast-paced thriller that will keep you guessing until the end, I’d definitely recommend Depth of Lies. I enjoyed it so much that I can’t wait to read more from E.C. Diskin.

RATING: 4 STARS

This book was a delightful guilty pleasure of a ride, like a season of Real Housewives. It really makes you question all the people around you and how well you know them - past the social media and party-ready facade.

It’s really juicy.

That’s really what this book is about: Kat returns to her old neighborhood and best friends for a terrible reason; their friend Shea was found dead in a bathtub next to a bottle of pills. Everyone assumes it was either a suicide or a terrible accident. But as Kat and her girlfriends begin to discuss the final months of Shea’s life, it becomes obvious that not only is just about everyone hiding something, but Shea’s death may not have been so accidental after all.

The book alternates between Kat’s POV in the present and Shea’s character during the final six months is her life.

I love stories like this that keep you a little off balance - there’s absolutely nothing that is certain because you can’t trust anyone. It keeps you on your toes. It also leads to more developed, complex characters: no one is flat or one-dimensional. There’s sides and motivations to everything.

DNF @ 25% so I'm not going to rate this.

I just can't do it anymore and I have too many other reading options.

This book is about a group of friends in their fifties that get together after one in their group supposedly commits suicide. Kat doesn't believe it and has decided to investigate the matter. Nothing about this story rings true. These women are in their fifties but they act like teenagers. I love unlikable characters IF they are interesting but these women are anything but interesting. Not to mention there is just too many characters and it was hard to keep up with who was who.

Goodreads says I read this twice but I couldn't even finish it this one time so STOP LYING Goodreads!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Great Read! A solid mystery that has an ending that was completely unexpected. In reflection, all the insight into the characters throughout the book made the ending a perfect "fit". Aside from the mystery of the plot, there is an engaging story of marriages and friendships, with all the highs, lows and everything in between. Definitely recommend and I look forward to reading more from this author! Thanks to NetGalley and Thomas and Mercer for the ARC of this book.