Sliver of Truth

Title: Sliver of Truth
Author: Lisa Unger
ISBN: 978 0 307 33846 4
Published: Crown Publishing
Date: 2007
Book quote:
“The phone number was listed but I couldn’t bring myself to call. What could I say? Hi, I’m Ridley, your second cousin. How’s it going? So, about the night my grandmother was beaten into a coma…”
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Having read and adored Unger’s previous book Beautiful Lies, I plunged into this one with considerable zeal. High expectations are never a good thing.


It’s astonishing how the same thing can taste so different when re-hashed. I loved Beautiful Lies for its forward thrust, the clear writing, the unashamed use of cliffhangers and the genuinely good plot. Sliver of Truth carries on where the Beautiful Lies left off: Ridley Jones is in a now-disintegrating relationship with Jake Jacobsen and there’s something fishy emerging about her Uncle Max’s state of demise. Now, there’s nothing wrong with carrying on where you left off. It’s endlessly hearkening back to the earlier narrative that gets annoying. I read the first 50 pages, thinking ‘surely now we’ll leave all that stuff behind’ – nope. Carries on right to the end. In a way it’s the very theme of the book: not being able to move forward.

This is not to say that the volume isn’t stuffed with action, sex and intrigue. Ridley lurches from one crisis to the next, gets involved in international espionage, gets onto the FBI Wanted list, people drop dead like flies and whenever she manages to take a breath she takes the opportunity to plunge into bed with someone. Theoretically it’s all good stuff.

But there are several problems. First the incessant harping back to the previous book. Second, the endless analysing of motives and feelings. If I submitted something with that degree of mumbling introspective discussion, I’d get my wrists slapped for ignoring ‘show not tell’, and sent back empty–handed with nothing more than a flea in my ear.

Third… it’s plain sloppy at points. Overwriting and careless use of words. (I never thought I’d write this of Unger. She must have been distracted at the time.) Frankly the sort of things that an editor should pick up on anyway. I could tell it wasn’t just me that was being irritated by this: my copy as usual came from the library and I found that someone had gone through it with a neat black biro correcting grammatical errors and word misuse… and they didn’t even bother with things like split infinitives and tautologies.

So why did I pelt through it so quickly, then? I read it slightly despairingly, but to the end, and fast. I didn’t feel like giving up on it. Which leads to the conclusion: all those writing rules are good but if you’ve got a good story with pace to it, you’ll drag the reader behind you, kicking and screaming. Will I read it again? No. Will it put me off other Unger books? No. I’ll just be hoping she’ll be on better form next time.