THE LYING GAME (SERIES)

BOOK 1: THE LYING GAME

Emma Paxton grew up in foster care. She worked hard for the money she earned.

“Tampons were a better security system against creepy boys than a rabid pack of Rottweilers” (14-15).

Sutton Mercer was separated from her twin Emma as a baby. She got adopted into a well-off family, became spoiled, and didn’t fully appreciate everything she had.

Because Sutton was cruel to everyone, it’s not surprising that someone got their revenge by killing her. Now a ghost in the in-between, her soul is tethered to Emma’s until she resolves her unfinished business of figuring out who her killer was -- the very killer that lured Emma into taking Sutton’s place so that there would be no body, no crime.

“I looked over Ema’s shoulder. I recognized the girls in the photos. I understood we used to be close. But they were like books I’d read two summers ago; I knew I’d liked them, but I couldn’t tell you now what they’d been about” (31).

“At least she had a clear picture of what the Lying Game was now: Girl Scouts for psychopaths” (202).

“Whatever was going on here was like the mud bath. The deeper my sister plunged, the darker and dirtier it got” (226).

Emma is stuck.

Emma tries to tell the police the truth, but given Sutton’s history of being the-girl-who-cried-wolf, they think it’s another prank.

Emma tries to tell her parents the truth, but they think she’s just trying to get out of school.

Emma gets a note from the killer to tell no one else about the truth, so trying to tell more people might put their lives in danger. She does confide in Ethan, though, considering how persistent he was in knowing the truth and alluding that Emma must be someone other than Sutton based on how differently she acts.

Emma contemplates leaving town, but either the police will think that Sutton just ran away, or will have the wrong date of Sutton’s disappearance, or will think that Emma was the prime suspect who envied what Sutton had. And even if Emma does skip town, she doesn’t have a place to run to. Her last foster home threw her out (since the biological son of her foster parents framed her for stealing money). She’s almost 18 and can be on her own, but she needs help getting established. The only friend she keeps in touch with is a girl named Alex.

Emma realizes more and more just how trashy the Lying Game was.

Examples of pranks include:

Hiring a theater student to act as a cop who is about to arrest Sutton’s enemy (co-captain for the tennis team, Nisha) for a crime she didn’t commit.

Kidnapping Sutton and choking her until the point she became unconscious.

(From Book 3, flashback to freshman year): Making Ethan lose a science scholarship for a camp that his parents didn’t have enough money to send him to otherwise.

For most of this book, the prime suspects were the people in the snuff video (as Emma thought that Sutton died at the end of it):

Charlotte: She was dating Garrett before Garrett dumped her for Sutton.

Laurel: She was best friends/ had a crush on Madeline’s brother, Thayer. Somehow Thayer liked Sutton and she made him run away.

Madeline: She misses her brother, who Sutton made run away.

It fits that in the middle of a sleepover, the killer somehow snuck into Charlotte’s house (without tripping the alarm) to threaten Emma to keep playing along. Maybe the killer was already inside the house (of whom were Charlotte, Laurel, Madeline, and the Twitter Twins).

However, all of these suspects get cleared (in this book and next book):

Laurel: She was at Nisha’s tennis team sleepover the night Sutton disappeared (August 31st).

Madeline called Charlotte (after not getting an answer from Sutton) on the 31st, who was with her all night to talk about how her dad hits her whenever she misbehaves (whether it’s for staying out past curfew or for smoking cigarettes).

Furthermore, mysterious loner boy Ethan clarifies that he was riding his bike in the forest the day of the snuff video and ran to Sutton’s aid when he noticed that she became unconscious. He saw that she came to afterwards and remained friends with Laurel, Charlotte, and Madeline, so her death didn’t come until later.

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BOOK 2: NEVER HAVE I EVER

Emma has new prime suspects: The Twitter Twins (Lillie and Gabby).

They were also present at the sleepover (making it easy access for threatening Emma).

They had a motive. Sutton once broke one of the Lying Game rules by stalling her car over train tracks and using the fail-safe words “Cross my heart, hope to die” to freak her friends out even more (since those words are supposed to signal when you’re actually in trouble). Only when the approaching train was a few yards away did she release her car from the choke and drive out of the way. The incident may have triggered Gabby’s seizure that in turn triggered her dormant epilepsy. Everyone in the car covered for Sutton when the police questioned them, but Lillie vowed to get her payback some other way.

Lillie and Gabby finally act out their master plan:

They stage a fight with each other en route to their camping destination. Lillie pretends to call a cab to go back home, but really she assumes her position at the bottom of a cliff. Gabby then gets Emma to push her, and she pretends like she loses her footing and falls off the top of the cliff. She lands on a ledge while Lillie fakes a big crashing sound. When everyone splits up to look for Gabby, Lillie and Gabby corner Emma and pretend like they’re about to choke her to death.

However, the Twitter Twins get cleared from the list of suspects:

All they really wanted was to pull off an epic prank as payback for the train prank AND to prove that they are worthy of being official club members of the Lying Game (which they get initiated into in the end).

The Twitter Twins were on-stage when a giant light almost fell on Emma’s head backstage and a figure dressed in black wrote on a chalkboard for her to stop digging. When Emma later asks them about it, they deny having anything to do with it.

At the end of this book, Thayer (who we learn Sutton may have run over with her car that Emma has yet to track down?) makes an appearance by sneaking into Sutton’s bedroom at 3am.

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BOOK 3: TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

For most of this book, Thayer is the #1 suspect for the following reasons:

He has been receiving treatment at a Seattle mental institution, and he’s been known to have quick mood swings. Maybe he snapped when Sutton wasn’t ready to break off her relationship with Garret to exclusively date him instead?

He was visiting Sutton alone in an Arizona desert on the night she died.

He used to be a star soccer player, but now he walks with a limp. If Sutton is responsible for this, she effectively ruined his plans for the future, thus giving him further motive to kill her.

The fact that he’s been missing gives him flexibility for moving about town discreetly.

However, his name is cleared due to the following reasons:

He was actually being treated for his alcohol abuse in a rehab sector of the mental institution; not a psych ward.

Someone else hijacked Sutton’s car and ran him over with it.

Laurel took him to the hospital to get treated while Sutton was left in the desert. There’s no way Thayer could have left the hospital in his shape to kill Sutton.

The following two characters are now back on the suspect list:

Laurel: She’s jealous that Thayer visited Sutton instead of her that night. It probably seems to her like her older sister gets everything she wants. If she left Nisha’s sleepover early to take Thayer to the hospital, her alibi is no longer air-tight. Maybe she visited Sutton after dropping off Thayer at the hospital.

Garrett: He’s very jealous that both Thayer and Ethan have expressed interest in Emma. Maybe his jealousy caused him to snap?

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BOOK 4: HIDE AND SEEK

For the first half of the book, Laurel is Emma’s top suspect. However, a nurse confirms that Laurel waited in the hospital waiting room (even after Thayer told her to go) and was so hysterically upset that Thayer had gotten hurt that the hospital staff made sure she stayed overnight so that she didn’t drive in that state.

Meanwhile, a group of freshmen (“The Devious Four”) try to take the senior Lying Game members’ spot as the high school queens. They vandalize the school, and because the Lying Game members have been busted for similar pranks in the past, the principal assumes they were behind this stunt as well. However, because the school doesn’t have security cameras, she can’t actually suspend them. So she cancels the spring dance until someone comes forward. This makes the Lying Game group unpopular (since everyone else also assumes they were behind the vandalism). Thankfully, because Ethan is good with computers, he’s able to hack into the traffic surveillance system, which had captured the Devious Four in action. The Lying Game then throws their own dance, and when the Devious Four crash it, they play the surveillance footage for all to see.

For the second half of the book, Emma has a new top suspect: Mr. Mercer.

His fingerprints were all over her car (since he had originally helped Sutton fix it up).

That night at the desert, Thayer saw Mr. Mercer with a lady who was definitely not Mrs. Mercer. So that is why Thayer had told Sutton to run. Thayer had assumed that the person chasing them shortly after that was Mr. Mercer, trying to cover up the fact that he was having an “affair”.

However, Mr. Mercer’s name gets cleared. After Laurel picked up Thayer, Mr. Mercer was driving around and found Sutton running alone. He picked her up and told her the truth -- that the woman Thayer saw him with was Becky Mercer (aka Emma/Sutton’s birth mom, who now goes by Raven Jennings). Ted and Kristen Mercer had Becky when they were young, and then Becky had Emma/Sutton when she was young. Kristen doesn’t know that Ted still keeps in touch with Becky from time to time or that he periodically sends Becky money, and he wants to keep it that way to avoid upsetting things. So Ted and Kristen are actually Emma/Sutton’s biological grandparents.

After Mr. Mercer explained the truth, he offered to drive to a secluded area for Sutton to finally meet her birth mom. However, Sutton was so upset about the lies and the fact that her birth mom had abandoned her in the first place, so she jumps out of the car and runs off. Mr. Mercer considered looking for her, but he figured that Sutton needed to calm down first. Plus, since he’s a doctor, he got called into surgery shortly thereafter.

Because Becky is known to be mentally unstable, is she a possible suspect? All Thayer thinks he saw of the driver in the car that ran him over was someone with dark hair, which doesn’t rule Becky out…

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BOOK 5: CROSS MY HEART, HOPE TO DIE

Top suspect: Becky. She’s medically diagnosed as being unstable, and she doesn’t have an alibi (since she’s free to wander around without an agenda). It’s true that mothers should have unconditional love for their children, but since Becky wasn’t expecting twins, it’s possible that she’s now “correcting the mistake”.

It turns out that Becky didn’t tell anyone (not even Mr. Mercer) that she gave birth to twins. She just dropped Sutton off to them and then tried to raise Emma on her own. Then, it turns out that the reason why Becky left Emma when Emma was 5 was because Becky had gotten pregnant with another child (although she later lost custody over this child, now 12 years old). Becky had tried keeping an eye on Emma, but she had eventually lost track of her (due to how frequently she bounced between foster homes). Becky wanted them to reunite, though, so the night in Sabino Canyon, Becky asked Sutton to look for her. Then, Becky left Sutton when she felt she was having another episode come on, and then left for Vegas to continue to look for Emma (which means that she wasn’t in town for leaving Emma threatening notes).

While Emma was snooping in Nisha’s dad’s mental institution’s records room to look for Becky’s records (last name: M), she finds Ethan’s thick file (last name:L). She doesn’t look into Ethan’s file, though. Later, he claims that what happened is that his dad abused his mom before he left him, and one time, he fought his dad to defend his mom, but because his mom is loyal to her husband (convinced that she deserves however he treats her), she called the cops on her son, who got dismissed by the courts due to being a minor but had to keep going in for counseling appointments. (But how can his file be so thick if this is only the case?).

At the end of the book, Nisha frantically calls Emma several times, which Emma doesn’t pick up for. Later, Nisha is discovered faced-down in the family pool, despite her being super athletic. “Coinicidentally”, Ethan wasn’t in school that day since he was “sick”, but he’s magically all better by the evening in time for dinner at Emma’s house.

Even though Nisha was an enemy at the beginning of the book, Emma managed to become friends with her. So, we feel extra bad about Nisha’s death.

Lesson from Thayer:

“One of the things I learned in rehab that turned out not to be a total cliche is that you can’t control other people. The best you can do is be honest with the people you love and hope that they’ll care enough about you to listen. But you can’t make someone be something they’re not. …// You can’t prevent other people from disappointing you. It’s bound to happen at some point. We’re all only human. What you can do is decide how you’re going to respond to it, how you’re going to deal with it” (239-240).

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BOOK 6: SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN

Top suspect: Garrett. He’s shown that he has a violent and jealous side, and he still seems obsessed with Sutton months after their breakup. It turns out that he’s been unstable ever since he invited his younger sister to a party where she got raped. Garrett’s car was picked up by surveillance to be at the Sabino Canyon’s parking lot, and he met up with Sutton after Becky left. He was upset that she lied to him about not going to Nisha’s sleepover, instead secretly meeting up with Thayer and wearing short shorts for him. He gets drunk and is close to throwing Sutton off a cliff in rage, but then he lets her go safely on the ground by his feet. When he realizes what he was close to doing, he sobers up and considers jumping off the ledge to commit suicide to stop himself from hurting others. Sutton talked him out of it, but while Garrett was leaving and had offered her a ride, she declined since she didn’t feel safe with him quite yet.

Now, Sutton’s 4-month decomposed body is discovered by a hiker. Near it is Emma’s stolen ID (meaning that the killer went back to the scene of the crime to plant it). For some time, everyone believes that it’s Emma’s body. But then a cop swabs Emma’s cheek for DNA to confirm that it is her twin’s body, and while doing so, notices that Emma has two fillings in her back molars (which matches Emma’s dental records, and doesn’t match Sutton’s no-cavity record).

Now, everyone thinks that Emma killed Sutton and took over her life to have everything that she didn’t have. The Mercers change their locks and kick her out, and Sutton’s friends similarly cut her off. The only place Emma can turn to for refuge is Ethan’s house.

Desperate to clear her name, Emma convinces Ethan to sneak into Nisha’s house (next door to Ethan’s) to find clues for what Niska might have been killed for. While doing so, it dawns that Nisha might have the same hiding spot as her: in tampon boxes. Sure enough, in the bathroom, in the cabinet under the sink, in a Costco-sized tampon box, there’s a thick manilla folder with Ethan’s psychiatric record. (Ethan had suspected that Nisha had stolen this because that day, Nisha avoided him, and when Ethan called to have his file “transferred to his new psychiatrist”, he was told that his file was missing).

Inside Ethan’s file, we discover that when he was only 8 years old, he killed a girl he considered to be his best friend because she had started getting close with another girl despite the fact that Ethan believed “you’re only supposed to have one best friend”. Due to his young age and how he was “showing signs of remorse” (even though he was just playing to an audience), the case got dismissed as manslaughter. His family moved to a new location (Tuscon) for a fresh start.

In Tuscon, Ethan falls in love with Sutton. He doesn’t understand how she can love guys like Garrett and Thayer but not him. Seeing how upset she got during a family history project (since she’s adopted), Ethan came up with a plan: If he could reunite her with her birth family, then obviously she would be so grateful to him that she would fall in love with him. So Ethan hacked into hospital records, and even though he found out that Sutton’s birth mom was unstable and may not make for a happy reunion, he also found out that Sutton had a twin! He tracked down Emma and stalked Emma in-person (taking pictures) to make sure it was actually her.

In Sabino Canyon, after Garrett left, Ethan saw a perfect opportunity to tell the now-single Sutton about his discovery. Afterwards, he makes a move, but Sutton gently declines and tells him that she only sees him as a friend. Ethan gets so upset that he pushes Sutton off a cliff and kills her. He decided that if he can’t have Sutton, then no one can. He then uses Emma for another purpose: to cover up his murder. He lures Emma by sending a link of the snuff video (that he hacked off Laurel’s computer) to Emma’s sleezy foster brother, Travis.

When Emma found the file, she immediately quietly called Laurel and told her that it’s Ethan who is the killer and that they’re in Nisha’s house. Then she hung up when heard Ethan’s footsteps approaching the bathroom. Emma tried to play it cool, but Ethan could tell that she was acting strangely. He said that they should go to the police to tell them their hunch about it being Garrett (even though they still had no strong evidence), but Ethan instead circled around the block and then continued past his/Nisha’s house and towards the canyon. He planned to kill Emma the same way he killed Sutton, although framing it to look like a suicide from “her remorse of killing her sister”. Emma sweet talks him, then when he least expects it, knees him in the groin and makes a run for it. Ethan is about to outrun her, but then Thayer pops out of nowhere and tackles him with police sirens in the background.

(After the phone call, Laurel called Thayer. They checked out Nisha’s house, but didn’t see signs of anyone there. When they spotted Ethan’s car by the Sabino Canyon entrance, they decided they were there. They called 9-1-1, but took matters into their own hands instead of waiting.)

Emma gets accepted by Sutton’s family and friends as herself. She also plans to try to track down her 12-year-old half-sister in California to see if she’s happy there or if she wants to move in. Ethan gets sentenced to 2 counts of murder and 1 count of attempted murder. Sutton finally gets proper closure and disintegrates.