Author Interview: Last Girl Lied To

Last Girl Lied To releases tomorrow, and I am so excited to have author L.E. Flynn on the blog in celebration today! If your a fan of Kara Thomas’ psychological thrillers, you are going to want to add Last Girl Lied To to your TBR!

Interview with L.E. Flynn

Let’s start off with a little bit about the book—describe Last Girl Lied Toin five words:

Dark, surprising, obsessive, complicated, and unrelenting.

Your debut Firsts is a contemporary romance while Last Girl Lied To is a psychological thriller. What inspired the switch and how was the drafting process different?

That’s a great question! I didn’t set out consciously to make the switch. I’m a firm believer in writing the story you’re passionate about, and Last Girl Lied To was that story for me at that time. The drafting process was the same at first—I’m a very fast first drafter and I don’t plot at all. I go into a first draft with just the hook and a sense of the characters. But… while Firsts came together quickly, Last Girl Lied To was rewritten and pieced together differently. It required a lot of attention due to the dual timelines and multiple twists. It was a very intensive writing experience, and it taught me a lot.

Last Girl Lied To is told through alternating chapters between the past and present. How did you go about writing the story this way?

The first draft of the story I wrote was told solely in the present, and I realized that just wasn’t working at all. I then went back and rewrote it with dual timelines. I mainly wrote in order—I feared that the flow wouldn’t feel cohesive otherwise. But in revision, I played around with the scenes—cut some, added some. I listened to the “American Beauty” soundtrack while writing, because I found songs with words too distracting!

What psychological thrillers do you recommend your readers check out after they finish Last Girl Lied To and want more from the genre?

Ooh, love this question! There are SO many excellent ones out there. I’m a huge fan of Kara Thomas—her latest, The Cheerleaders, is chilling in the best possible ways. I also adore anything by Kim Savage or Mindy McGinnis. (Female of the Species, especially, is brutal and jarring and incredible.) And while it won’t be out until 2020, I was able to read Hannah Capin’s Foul Is Fair early, and let me tell you… wow. Add it to your TBR if you love dark, feminist thrillers.

What’s up next? Are you writing another thriller?

I am! I don’t think I’ll ever not be writing a thriller. I feel like I’ve found my happy place with them. (I’m not sure what that says about me, ha!) Look out for my next book with Imprint/Macmillan to come out in 2020… I’m hoping to be able to share more details soon. For now, I’ll say that it has an extremely polarizing female protagonist, and that something terrible happens one day in the woods. Hopefully the twists and turns will keep you guessing until the very end.

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About Last Girl Lied To

Release Date: April 16, 2019
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Something made him angry that night.

Something made her cry.

Something made Trixie disappear.

What if it was all the same thing? 

Fiona claims she doesn’t remember anything about the night her best friend left a party early and walked into the ocean. But the truth is, she wishes she could forget.

Trixie’s disappearance is ruled a suicide, but Fiona starts to believe that Trixie isn’t really dead. Piecing together the trail of a girl who doesn’t want to be found leads her to Jasper, Trixie’s former friend with benefits, and Beau—the boy who turned Fiona down, who loved someone else, who might be happy Trixie is gone.

The closer Fiona gets to finding out what happened, and the closer she gets to Jasper and Beau, the more she realizes that the girl she knew better than anyone may have been a carefully constructed lie—and she might have been waiting to disappear the entire time.

Told in alternating chapters between the past and the present, Last Girl Lied To is a gripping emotional thriller.

About Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

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Laurie Elizabeth (L.E.) Flynn is the author of Firsts and the upcoming psychological thriller Last Girl Lied To, along with an untitled thriller to follow in 2020. She is also the author of Wattpad featured series The Boys Tell All. Her other short fiction has been named a finalist for the John Kenneth Gailbraith Literary Award.

Flynn is a former model who worked in Tokyo, Athens, and Paris. She now lives in London, Ontario, with her husband, daughter, and the world’s most spoiled Chihuahua. When she’s not writing about unlikable girls, you can likely find her hiking in the woods with her family, perusing thrift stores for vintage dresses, or binging reality TV.