"Sweet Little Lies"

Caz Frear grew up in Coventry, England, and spent her teenage years dreaming of moving to London and writing a novel. After fulfilling her first dream, it wasn’t until she moved back to Coventry thirteen years later that the second finally came true. She has a degree in History & Politics, and when she’s not agonizing over snappy dialogue or incisive prose, she can be found shouting at Arsenal football matches or holding court in the pub on topics she knows nothing about.

Frear applied the Page 69 Test to Sweet Little Lies, her first novel, and reported the following:

I’m not sure if any one page is wholly representative of Sweet Little Lies as the goalposts shift continuously and the twists and turns come thick and fast (I hope!) However, London is very present on page 69 so in this sense, it is quite representative. When I first started writing Sweet Little Lies, I was in the process of moving out of London back to the West Midlands and writing about the city helped me deal with my homesickness!

“I just don’t understand it. I assumed she’d gone to the coast like before. She loved being by the sea, whereas she hated London. Absolutely hated it.”

The victim, Alice Lapaine, has been found murdered in London (after spending a few weeks in the city) and this has come as a great shock to her husband, Tom. He simply can’t think of a reason why she might have headed there. This is probably the first hint that there’s much more to the victim than meets the eye. Has she been living a secret life? Has she lied to her husband?

Page 69 also provides a small insight into DC Cat Kinsella’s background. The reader infers from this page that she grew up in London but that her family moved out to the Home Counties when she was still quite young. The phrase ‘the bourgeois mystique of Radlett’ is designed to tell the reader exactly what she thought of that decision - Cat Kinsella is very much a London girl at heart!

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--Marshal Zeringue