Everything Is Lies by Helen Callaghan
Apr. 19th, 2026 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
No one is who you think they are.
Sophia’s parents lead quiet, ordinary lives. At least that is what she’s always believed.
Everyone has secrets.
Until the day she arrives at her childhood home to find a house ringing with silence. Her mother hanging from a tree. Her father lying in a pool of his own blood, near death.
Especially those closest to you.
The police are convinced it is an attempted murder-suicide. But Sophia is sure that the woman who brought her up isn’t a killer. With her father in a coma, it is up to Sophia to clear her mother’s name. To do this she needs to delve deep into her family’s past - a past full of dark secrets she never suspected were there …
27-year-old Sophia Mackenzie works in a small architectural firm where she’s putting together a design pitch to Scottish Heritage for a visitor’s centre that could make or break her career. She has a complicated relationship with her parents who run a garden and cafe near the coast. Her mother Nina is needy, constantly phoning her and asking her to visit and her dad, Jared, is a bit of a grump who prefers pottering in the gardens, which are open to the public, than dealing with visitors.
When her mother phones her one night and urges her to come home, Sophia feels guilty for turning her down in favour of a work do. When she goes to visit her parents the next day, however, she is shocked to find her mother hanging from a tree and her father nearby with serious stab wounds to his abdomen. The police are convinced that her mother committed an attempted murder/suicide but Sophia knows that her mum simply didn’t have such violence within her.
After her childhood friend Rowan (who now helps her father with his gardening business) reveals that her parents had been subjected to a series of burglaries, Sophia learns that her mother had written and sold a memoir based on her time in a cult called Morningstar run by famous 80s rock musician Aaron Kessler. The memoir is based on notebooks that her mother kept explaining how she first came into Aaron’s orbit and what happened to her there, notebooks that her mother’s publisher now wants Sophia to find so that the book can still be published.
But when Sophia finds the first two of her mother’s notebooks and begins to read, she discovers secrets that she had no idea existed, secrets that people would kill to keep, secrets that will reveal the truth of what really happened to her parents …
Helen Callaghan’s psychological thriller is a mixed affair whose component parts didn’t gel for me. Nina is believable as a biddable person courtesy of manipulative and abusive parents but her descent into the cult wasn’t easy to empathise with, the cult itself lacked a sense of danger and the notebook device was a little clunky. Equally Sophia’s work woes are a dull sub plot that’s wrapped up too neatly and didn’t work with the main plot line.
In the acknowledgements section at the end of the book Callaghan discusses her research into cults and I think that this does come through in the book. I believed in Nina as a young woman who has been bullied all her life by manipulative and uncaring parents (particularly her father who is controlling and clearly has anger issues) who goes up to Cambridge to study English but whose lack of self-confidence means that she quickly falls under the influence of the handsome and famous Aaron Kessler. The problem is that for this to happen, Nina has to be a fairly passive character and she has to ignore obvious red flags, which I did not find easy to empathise with as a reader. It isn is’t helped by the fact that Nina’s story comes through the incorporation of her notebooks, which is a clunky device not least because you get a chunk of prose and then have Sophia having to react to it.
Callaghan tries to offset this by having Sophia being menaced by strange people who may or may not be part of the Morningstar cult, but these elements don’t go particularly far and end in a way that I found unsatisfyingly open ended. Equally Sophia’s storyline involving a superior at her office trying to shunt her off the pitch to Scottish Heritage after a one night stand goes wrong was too low stakes to hold my interest and again, has an ending that all feels a little tacked on.
The Morningstar cult itself comes across for the most part as icky rather than sinister, the only danger coming when there’s a mysterious death during a ceremony, except that there is precious little detail as to what happened on the night in question because Nina was drugged. Aaron is sleazy rather than mysterious, but there are hints of more depth to his acolytes - notably Lucy and Penelope - which I wish had been further developed given what Sophia finds when she meets them later.
Notwithstanding that the story didn’t work for me, it is a pacy read and Callaghan keeps the action going. Even though this novel didn’t really work for me, I would nonetheless check out her other work.
The Verdict:
Helen Callaghan’s psychological thriller is a mixed affair whose component parts didn’t gel for me. Nina is believable as a biddable person courtesy of manipulative and abusive parents but her descent into the cult wasn’t easy to empathise with, the cult itself lacked a sense of danger and the notebook device was a little clunky. Equally Sophia’s work woes are a dull sub plot that’s wrapped up too neatly and didn’t work with the main plot line.
Sophia’s parents lead quiet, ordinary lives. At least that is what she’s always believed.
Until the day she arrives at her childhood home to find a house ringing with silence. Her mother hanging from a tree. Her father lying in a pool of his own blood, near death.
The police are convinced it is an attempted murder-suicide. But Sophia is sure that the woman who brought her up isn’t a killer. With her father in a coma, it is up to Sophia to clear her mother’s name. To do this she needs to delve deep into her family’s past - a past full of dark secrets she never suspected were there …
27-year-old Sophia Mackenzie works in a small architectural firm where she’s putting together a design pitch to Scottish Heritage for a visitor’s centre that could make or break her career. She has a complicated relationship with her parents who run a garden and cafe near the coast. Her mother Nina is needy, constantly phoning her and asking her to visit and her dad, Jared, is a bit of a grump who prefers pottering in the gardens, which are open to the public, than dealing with visitors.
When her mother phones her one night and urges her to come home, Sophia feels guilty for turning her down in favour of a work do. When she goes to visit her parents the next day, however, she is shocked to find her mother hanging from a tree and her father nearby with serious stab wounds to his abdomen. The police are convinced that her mother committed an attempted murder/suicide but Sophia knows that her mum simply didn’t have such violence within her.
After her childhood friend Rowan (who now helps her father with his gardening business) reveals that her parents had been subjected to a series of burglaries, Sophia learns that her mother had written and sold a memoir based on her time in a cult called Morningstar run by famous 80s rock musician Aaron Kessler. The memoir is based on notebooks that her mother kept explaining how she first came into Aaron’s orbit and what happened to her there, notebooks that her mother’s publisher now wants Sophia to find so that the book can still be published.
But when Sophia finds the first two of her mother’s notebooks and begins to read, she discovers secrets that she had no idea existed, secrets that people would kill to keep, secrets that will reveal the truth of what really happened to her parents …
Helen Callaghan’s psychological thriller is a mixed affair whose component parts didn’t gel for me. Nina is believable as a biddable person courtesy of manipulative and abusive parents but her descent into the cult wasn’t easy to empathise with, the cult itself lacked a sense of danger and the notebook device was a little clunky. Equally Sophia’s work woes are a dull sub plot that’s wrapped up too neatly and didn’t work with the main plot line.
In the acknowledgements section at the end of the book Callaghan discusses her research into cults and I think that this does come through in the book. I believed in Nina as a young woman who has been bullied all her life by manipulative and uncaring parents (particularly her father who is controlling and clearly has anger issues) who goes up to Cambridge to study English but whose lack of self-confidence means that she quickly falls under the influence of the handsome and famous Aaron Kessler. The problem is that for this to happen, Nina has to be a fairly passive character and she has to ignore obvious red flags, which I did not find easy to empathise with as a reader. It isn is’t helped by the fact that Nina’s story comes through the incorporation of her notebooks, which is a clunky device not least because you get a chunk of prose and then have Sophia having to react to it.
Callaghan tries to offset this by having Sophia being menaced by strange people who may or may not be part of the Morningstar cult, but these elements don’t go particularly far and end in a way that I found unsatisfyingly open ended. Equally Sophia’s storyline involving a superior at her office trying to shunt her off the pitch to Scottish Heritage after a one night stand goes wrong was too low stakes to hold my interest and again, has an ending that all feels a little tacked on.
The Morningstar cult itself comes across for the most part as icky rather than sinister, the only danger coming when there’s a mysterious death during a ceremony, except that there is precious little detail as to what happened on the night in question because Nina was drugged. Aaron is sleazy rather than mysterious, but there are hints of more depth to his acolytes - notably Lucy and Penelope - which I wish had been further developed given what Sophia finds when she meets them later.
Notwithstanding that the story didn’t work for me, it is a pacy read and Callaghan keeps the action going. Even though this novel didn’t really work for me, I would nonetheless check out her other work.
The Verdict:
Helen Callaghan’s psychological thriller is a mixed affair whose component parts didn’t gel for me. Nina is believable as a biddable person courtesy of manipulative and abusive parents but her descent into the cult wasn’t easy to empathise with, the cult itself lacked a sense of danger and the notebook device was a little clunky. Equally Sophia’s work woes are a dull sub plot that’s wrapped up too neatly and didn’t work with the main plot line.
