The Five Year Lie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and death by suicide.

Protagonist Ariel is a glass artisan and the heiress to a tech fortune. She is a single mother of four-year-old Buzz, the son she had with Jay, a man who posed as a programmer in her father’s firm as Drew. When Drew disappeared at the same time that Ariel’s abusive father, Edward, supposedly died by suicide, Ariel mourned her beloved’s death. The novel’s inciting incident happens five years later when Ariel gets a text message seemingly from Drew, launching her down a path of discovery about who he truly was and what the conspiracy behind his disappearance means.

True to the tropes associated with being a protagonist of the thriller genre, Ariel is intelligent, resourceful, curious, and motivated to investigate the mystery with which she is presented at the beginning of the novel. At the same time, as a love interest in a novel that features elements of romance, Ariel is lovelorn and eager to reunite with Drew/Jay, the only man she has ever loved. As Ariel uncovers increasingly complex layers of criminal malfeasance at her family’s company, she suffers from the emotional toll of