Twisted Lies

Twisted Lies closes out Ana Huang's four-book Twisted series, and it is the volume that turns on the friend who has been arranging events in the background of the other three novels. The series began as self-published contemporary romance and was reissued in print by Bloom Books, which is the edition most readers now pick up. The books share a friendship group rather than a single plot, and each one hands its arc to a different couple, so the final volume pays off details that were planted in the earlier stories.

Christian Harper is written as a man who is comfortable with the parts of his work he does not describe, and the novel gives him a private obsession long before it gives him a conversation. Stella Alonso is a model with a public face she did not design, a writing habit nobody knows about and a threat in her past that stops being theoretical. The arrangement the two of them make is meant to solve one problem, and it is the kind of agreement that Huang's fiction uses to put two guarded people in the same room with no exit and then let them negotiate.

Because it is the last book in the set, Twisted Lies carries more of the series' connective tissue than the others, including the friend group's own history and the questions that the earlier volumes left open. It sits at the end of a run of four rather than standing alone in the way Twisted Games can, and readers who start here will meet characters whose stories are already finished. Content warnings for the series apply, including violence, stalking and explicit sex.