Quick Take
- Narration: Aimee Horne carries the psychological pressure of Margot’s perspective convincingly, though the Audible Original format keeps the runtime tight enough that character depth is compressed.
- Themes: Professional ethics and personal unraveling, complicity and self-deception, consequences that compound
- Mood: Tightly wound, unsettled, occasionally frustrating
- Verdict: A propulsive psychological thriller that delivers on twists but asks you to accept a protagonist making choices that strain credibility, listeners who prefer plot momentum over character logic will be most satisfied.
I picked this one up on a weekday morning commute, which turned out to be the right context and the wrong one simultaneously. Right, because six hours and twenty minutes of psychological thriller is perfectly calibrated for commuting, the format wants you distracted enough to not examine the seams too closely. Wrong, because by the time I reached the platform twist that opens the story, I was genuinely hooked and had to stop. J.P. Pomare is the author of In the Clearing and Trapdoor, and he knows how to engineer a premise.
The setup here is distinctive. Psychologist Margot Scott has the domestic profile of a thriller protagonist: suburban house, career, husband, two children. On a spring morning she approaches one of her clients on a busy train platform. He has a duffel bag, he is looking at his phone, the train is arriving. She slams into his back and he falls. From that pivot point, the novel unfolds in both directions, backward through the therapeutic relationship that brought her to that platform and forward through the legal and personal consequences that follow.
The Problem of Margot’s Credibility
The psychological thriller genre has a well-documented protagonist problem. The character must make increasingly questionable decisions to keep the plot in motion, and those decisions need to feel psychologically plausible rather than merely convenient. Margot Scott is a trained psychologist, and the book asks us to accept a series of professional and personal choices that at least one reviewer compared, pointedly, to the former astronaut Lisa Nowak’s 2007 incident, the educated professional who threw away a career through choices that seemed baffling from the outside.
Whether that credibility failure is a feature or a flaw depends entirely on your reading of the novel’s intent. If Pomare is making an argument that professional training does not immunize people against self-deception and poor judgment under pressure, then Margot’s irrationality is the point. If you need your protagonist to feel consistent and intelligent throughout, you will have a difficult relationship with her choices. Reviews split fairly evenly along this line, with some listeners calling the twists “unpredictable” and delightful and others describing the book as something they finished out of stubbornness rather than investment.
An Audible Original in Practice
At six hours and twenty minutes, Tell Me Lies runs shorter than most psychological thrillers of comparable ambition. This is an Audible Original, and the format carries both advantages and constraints. The pacing is tight, Pomare does not linger on backstory or secondary characters, which keeps the momentum high. The tradeoff is that Margot’s relationships, particularly with her husband and children, remain somewhat schematic. When the consequences of her choices hit those relationships, the emotional impact is real but not as deep as it might be in a longer work that had given those figures more space.
Aimee Horne’s narration suits the compressed format. She reads Margot as someone whose surface composure is perpetually at risk of cracking, which is the right interpretive choice. The thriller rhythm she maintains across the runtime prevents the pacing from ever becoming genuinely slack, even in the sections where the plot is setting up rather than delivering.
What the Ending Actually Does
One reviewer noted that “everyone got the ending they needed,” which is a generous and interesting way to describe a conclusion that several others found merely surprising rather than earned. The final twist is the kind that reframes prior events and asks you to reconsider what you understood. Whether that reconsideration is satisfying or simply clever depends on how invested you are in Margot and Cormac as people rather than as plot functions. Pomare is primarily interested in mechanism, in the architecture of the thriller, and delivers that architecture competently.
Available as a free audiobook through Audible, this is worth the six-hour investment for listeners who want a fast, twisty thriller and are not asking it to do more than that.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Tell Me Lies connected to the other J.P. Pomare novels, or is it completely standalone?
It is a standalone story with no plot connection to In the Clearing or Trapdoor. The only link is Pomare’s authorship and his consistent interest in psychological pressure and unreliable perspectives.
How graphic or violent is the content, is this appropriate for listeners sensitive to thriller darkness?
The violence is implied and situational rather than graphic. The psychological distress is more prominent than physical threat. This is closer to domestic psychological suspense than to crime procedural in terms of its content register.
Does Aimee Horne’s narration handle the twist-heavy structure well, or do reveals feel telegraphed in audio format?
Horne maintains consistent surface composure for Margot throughout, which means the reveals land without telegraphing. Audio thrillers sometimes suffer from a narrator who shifts register near a revelation; Horne avoids that.
Several reviews describe the protagonist making frustrating decisions, is this a slow-burn type of frustration or the kind that undermines enjoyment?
Reviews split on this. Listeners who accepted Margot’s irrationality as a thematic statement about self-deception found the book engaging. Those who needed the protagonist to behave plausibly found the middle section particularly difficult. Know your tolerance before you start.
