This one was a wild ass ride and I didn’t know what was going to happen. So many twists, unreliable characters, gaslighting. We lie here is a fantastically twisted journey into the world of those that won’t rest until they get what they want.

I picked this story blindly and unfortunately this wasn’t a memorable read for me.

This story follows Yara Gibson who has returned to her hometown to host her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary party with her sister. While rummaging through her family mementos to include in the celebration, she discovered a secret her parents had been hiding. What’s even more disturbing was the text Yara received from her cousin Felicia about exposing what she knew shortly before she was murdered. What message was Felicia trying to relay? How can Yara face her parents now?

The plot was definitely interesting and kept me hooked in the beginning but I cannot say the same for the execution. I find myself feeling bored halfway through and lost interest in the plot. The story was draggy and the dialogue was repetitive despite the plot twists.

I usually don’t mind a dysfunctional family story but this one just didn’t work for me. The characters weren’t particularly likeable and I wished Yara had a little more backbone to stand up to her mother and the way she was treated.

I did enjoy the plot twist and the way the secrets were all revealed in the end. That thankfully saved the story for me. Thank you Netgalley and Thomas and Mercer for the arc.

Honestly, this was a okay read. The story started of pretty well but unfortunately started to lag once we got the middle to the end; repetativesness and unusable details didn't help much either. There were times that I feel like the was this diconnect between the story and its characters but for the most part, We Lie Here is a okay read. I wished I could have enjoyed this one more but I definitely look forward to reading more works from Ms. Howzell Hall.

3.5 stars.
I like Rachel Howzell Hall’s mysteries (at least the ones I’ve read so far) and though I liked this book, I didn’t love it.

Main character Yara Gibson has organized an anniversary party for her parents in her home town of Antelope Valley, and heads there from her stressful life as a writer on a weekly cop show.

Yara is not looking forward to returning home: she has a somewhat difficult relationship with her manipulative mother, Yara suffers from asthma and has memory lapses and nightmares, partially from her medications and from what might be memories or an overactive imagination, her mother and young sister are smokers, and her home town is dry, windy and very dusty.

The days she arrives, she’s accosted by a relative, who claims she has important information for Yara, but before she can deliver it, the relative is found dead.

Yara begins looking into the death while she’s home, and she begins slowly unravelling secrets involving her parents, their friends, and their time in high school. Yara also has asthma attack after attack, and begins possibly hallucinating or confounding actual occurrences with possible nightmares, complicating one’s understanding of what Yara is actually seeing. So, quickly, one has to wonder how reliable a narrator Yara is, as well as who amongst her parents and relatives is telling the truth about her parents’ relationship, how it started, and the actions of people entwined with Yara’s family, including a woman who may be sending Yara threatening messages.

I can’t really say much more without spoiling the identity of the murderer (which I deduced early on). I found the family tensions well-drawn, with it becoming difficult to figure who was telling the truth. I did find this story a little less enjoyable than others I’ve read by this author, but that didn’t stop me eagerly reading right to the end.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Thomas & Mercer for this ARC in exchange for my review.

DNF at 47%
I loved These Toxic Things last year so I was super excited for this title. Unfortunately, the characters fell flat from the get go, and the pace was dreadfully slow. Add a weirdly dysfunctional family to the mix and I just had to pull the plug halfway through. Why is everyone afraid of someone who verbally threatens to pack her bags and leave her family for the slightest event? I really tried reading it but when it takes me 10 days to get to just half the book, it’s time to call it quits.

Since I DNF’ed, I asked a friend to reveal the ending, and well, yea…I’m glad I DNF’ed. Enough said.

After thoroughly enjoying These Toxic Things I absolutely couldn’t wait to read We Lie Here. As good as Toxic was, this book blew it out of the water. Twists and turns you don’t quite figure out until the end. Four stars, job very well done.

A young woman’s pilgrimage home for her parents' anniversary party is the basis for this twisty thriller that uncovers dark secrets and questions family loyalties. Yara Gibson is a successful television writer who slips back into bad habits when she is once again in the bosom of her family. When a childhood friend of Yara’s mother shows up with secrets to share but no invitation to the party, Yara questions what her mother could be hiding and who would benefit from those secrets coming to light. With Yara as the narrator, Hall does a wonderful job of keeping the reader as unsettled as our returning prodigal daughter.

I’m not going to lie, I struggled with this one. Took me ages to get through because I simply couldn’t connect with the characters. It started off pretty good but slowly lost me to the point that I just didn’t care about anything that was happening in the book. Thank you for letting me read this one….

Thank you to Thomas and Mercer for providing me with an advanced e-copy of We Lie Here. I have some mixed feelings about this one. I found the story to be engaging enough to want to know how it ended and solve the mystery. The I don't read a lot of black authors (something I'm actively trying to improve) so the dialog at times was difficult for me to follow. That being said, this was a very authentically written book. I could visualize the characters and their lives so easily. The author did a great job of creating so many unique and relatable characters. There were times when I felt that the story was a bit disjointed and some of the twists felt a little out of the blue. However, this was a quick read and the creepy twist at the end made it all worth it.

I was looking forward to reading We Lie Here by Rachel Howzell Hall because most times family dramas and mysteries are a good read. And I had read that this author’s writing career was to be admired. But Yara Gibson and her family add so much dysfunction to this story that it is almost impossible to find a character who is at least bearable. Yara is a television writer in California and she uses her vacation time to organize a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration for her parents in Palmdale. Sounds pretty good. But the more I read, the more I wanted to get to the end quickly. So many chapters are spent discussing Yara’s inhaler and other uninteresting subjects. There are a lot of possibilities here but most are not put to good use. The drama in this family is over the top and even a great ending does not make this novel shine. I will make a point of reading other books by Rachel Howzell Hall because I assume that We Lie Here is a one-off. Thank you to Thomas & Mercer, NetGalley and the author for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Well, I didn’t love this one. While the premise sounded really good, it ultimately moved too slow for me. The characters were not well developed and the plot was repetitive. I think Howzell Hall has some great potential, but this book could gave done with some more editing.

Family drama and toxic relationships!

An intriguing storyline with some great characters that many readers will love to hate.

I wouldn't say it was a fast paced read. There were times it slowed down quite a bit. However, I was still really intrigued and wanted to see how it all turned out.

Overall, I enjoyed this novel and I'm excited to read more from Rachel Howzell Hall!

I absolutely love Rachel Howzell Hall, so I was surprised to find this one didn't work for me. While Hall's writing is always enjoyable -- funny, snappy, witty, fierce -- the plot of this one was slow, and the characters did not particularly draw me in. I found myself struggling to finish. I highly recommend this author to all, but I would not start with this one -- try And Now She's Gone first instead.

Thanks to NetGalley for this read The book was not a good one for me. This book started out strong but it had some seriously slow parts in the book that made it drag so much. I wanted to enjoy it much more because the sister going missing was a great topic for a thriller and it was interesting at some parts but it dragged with fillers in many parts too.

Thank you to Netgalley, Rachel, and Thomas & Mercer for an advance copy of We Lie Here.

If Yara had it her way she’d never go back home, but here she is traveling back to Palmdale California as the main planner for her parents twentieth wedding anniversary. As the party approaches, Yara receives an ominous text and a confrontation with a family member she has never met before letting her know that there is life-changing information that she has to share with Yara. However, Felicia turns up dead before she has the chance to relay all of her information, leaving only a key to a family cabin containing unsolved secrets and upending Yara’s life as she is supposed to be celebrating love and family.

This was my second Rachel Howzell Hall book (the first being And Now She’s Gone) and it is now my favorite RHH book. While you’re not getting an innovative storyline, Rachel chose a good interesting setting – even moreso when you get deeper into the story and she’s combining both the very common secluded lakeside setting with the less common kind of rundown grimy suburban setting. Suburbs are no stranger to the thriller, but to take a less-affluent suburb rather than the “rich white people” suburb setting was creative and a new spin on what we see often.

Yara was not my favorite character, but I didn’t dislike her either. She had an attitude and was overall very negative…for very good reasons. I really enjoyed both her sister and mother, who were the reasons for her awful attitude. They weren’t likable either but they offered really great side stories and brought great drama to the book.

The twist was good, I wasn’t writing any characters off as totally innocent, but I definitely did not pinpoint where this was going.

In “We Lie Here”, Rachel Howzell Hall could deliver a pulsing and intriguing story revolving around family matters and mysteries of the past, but sadly doesn’t do that in a satisfactory way.

TV writer Yara Gibson’s hometown of Palmdale, California, isn’t her first choice for a vacation. But she’s back to host her parents’ twentieth-anniversary party and find the perfect family mementos for the celebration. Everything is going to plan until Yara receives a disturbing text: I have information that will change your life.

The message is from Felicia Campbell, who claims to be a childhood friend of Yara’s mother. But they’ve been estranged for years—drama best ignored and forgotten. But Yara can’t forget Felicia, who keeps texting, insisting that Yara talk to her “before it’s too late.”

But the next day is already too late for Felicia, whose body is found floating in Lake Palmdale. Before she died, Felicia left Yara a key to a remote lakeside cabin. In the basement are files related to a mysterious tragedy, unsolved since 1998. What secrets was Felicia hiding? How much of what Yara knows about her family has been true?

I’ll admit that I had some phases while reading this book and sometimes those weren’t so good ones. At first, I got really interested in this story and how the relationship between Yara and her family (especially her mother Bee) would develop and what secrets would resurface to make things boil up a bit. And I really was intrigued to see how toxic Yara and Bee’s relations were, how the first one would simply let go of something that was good to her health just to make her mother’s wishes and not “anger” her.

But suddenly all that toxic relationship trope became so recurrent and without point that it turned boring. Halfway or so through the book, then, Hall inserts some good things about Bee and other facts that could lead the reader to have some pity on her, but even like that her toxicity is incredibly overwhelming and makes it almost impossible to create some empathy.

In between the family drama that could be placed on most soap operas, the mystery revolving around Bee’s cousin Felicia Campbell’s death adds a bit of interestingness to the book, but still doesn’t save it from failing as a suspenseful story. Perhaps because the author spends so much time describing Yara’s health issues and how she ignores it for her mother’s sake (because deep down that’s all it boils down to) it slows down the pace of the book to something which almost makes the reader quit reading.

I got really bogged down reading this book, it was very slow and repetitive. There were way too many references to Yara the main characters asthma. Way too much focus on her toxic relationship with Bee. Every theme and symbol felt beaten to death. I didn’t end up being able to finish. I wanted to know the truth but not badly enough.

📝 A R C • R E V I E W 📝
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Title: We Lie Here
Author: Rachel Howzell Hall
Rating: 3/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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We Lie Here is a new release, just published in July and this one was not terrible but not great. It is definitely a slow burn, with a ton of filler but it has its moments. I enjoyed it but there were things that got on my nerves with this one.
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The story itself was interesting. The story follows Yara as she attempts to throw her parents a wedding anniversary party and a long lost cousin begins to text her about a secret that will change her life. When said cousin ends up dead, Yara takes it upon herself to dig into not only the death but her family’s secrets. I liked the mystery/drama aspect of the family and the uncovering of the family’s secrets. I enjoyed the fact that throughout the story Yara is at times an unreliable narrator due to loss of memory. The story kept me intrigued - to where I really wanted to know more about this family’s past, and at times was a bit thrilling.
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What I didn’t like was the feeling of complete repetition with certain things. Perfect example (not a spoiler) is the constant mention of cigarettes and smoking. I figured that it would have some significance in the story but no, not at all, it was just put in there to add words to pages. I felt like there were points that this one dragged and I definitely dont think that it needed to be as long as it was.
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The ending was also not very shocking, I had an inkling as to where this one was going as the story began to unfold, and I was right. Though I will say the execution was pretty good, Hall definitely has a way with vivid details that I was able to picture all of the scenes depicted.
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Will I remember this one in a few months? Honestly, probably not, it wasn’t anything that blew my mind, but it was still enjoyable enough. Overall if you are a big fan of slow burns, I would say give this one a shot! Thank you to NetGalley and Thomas Mercer for the eARC in exchange for my honest review. We Lie Here is out now and available on Kindle Unlimited!
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*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest review*

I wasn't as enamored with this book as other readers. It was a good story, don't get me wrong, but not even halfway through I had figured it out. It started out with a bang but I feel that it dragged middle way through until the end., but I would read another book by Rachel Howzell Hall.

We Lie Here, by Rachel Howzell Hall, is a twisty thriller full of family drama, secrets, lies and a decent mystery.
The setting, Palmdale, California, is suitably dismal and uninviting. Yara Gibson has returned there, her former hometown, and becomes embroiled in an old mystery and a new mysterious death.
The characters are broadly drawn, and generally not likeable, especially Yara’s mother. The prose is solid, with good descriptive elements. While the action builds slowly, I found there were enough red herrings and a surprising twist at the end to make it an enjoyable suspense story.

Thank you to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for the ARC. This is my honest opinion.