Evie Porter is not the kind of person you want to hang around with. Unless of course, you want to be scammed, you are into dishonest people, you embrace blackmail, and you are OK if people you know wind up dead. The title of the book says it all – this book is all about lies, deceit, fake identities and falsehoods. The book begins with Evie Porter moving in with her new boyfriend Ryan Sumner. The story is set in Louisiana as Evie is introduced to Ryan’s network of friends from childhood and college. Everyone knows everyone – except Evie. Evie claims she is from some small town in Alabama but not everyone is convinced that she is telling the truth. In the first couple of chapters, Evie reveals that her governing axiom is “the first lie wins” and things unravel from there. What follows is a sequence of flashbacks where we find out how Evie (if that is even her real name) evolved into a consummate con artist who works for a mysterious guy who is the puppeteer of an entire network of other con artists and sends his “agents” on a variety of nefarious missions. This book could have been good. But after a while, it just became too unbelievable. Evie has a MacGyver-like sidekick from MIT who can hack into any security system at any time to retrieve anything Evie wants. Need detailed floor plans to break into a building and bypass the entire security system? No problem. Just call your MacGyver cyber genius sidekick and he’ll have all the information you need in a few minutes. It could be that I am not stretching myself enough and maybe these kinds of people really exist and I just need to get out more. But I doubt it. There were other parts of the story where Evie’s plans and deceptions almost always conveniently work out exactly as she had planned them. To be fair, there are a bunch of interesting and fun plot twists as few things in the story are as they appear to be on the surface. I also thought the writing was very good. But as I was reading the last few chapters, I just didn’t care anymore. And in the end, the moral of the story is what goes around comes around.
For me, there were few likable characters and too many contrived plot lines. You will likely enjoy this book if you are the kind of reader who can suspend reason and relish the schemes and confidence games that fill this book. My observations are clearly in the minority as this book gets many four- and five-star review on Goodreads. However, in my opinion, First Lie Wins was just OK and I was glad when it was over and could move on to something else.