# Read the first page of The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager Read the opening of The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager free, no signup. Three campmates vanished; she returns years later. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-last-time-i-lied-riley-sager - Genre: Thriller - Year: 2018 - ISBN: 9781524743086 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781524743086&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781524743086 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781524743086 ## The opening This is how it begins. You wake to sunlight whispering through the trees just outside the window. It’s a faint light, weak and gray at the edges. Dawn still shedding the skin of night. Yet it’s bright enough to make you roll over and face the wall, the mattress creaking beneath you. Within that roll is a moment of disorientation, a split second when you don’t know where you are. It happens sometimes after a deep, dreamless slumber. A temporary amnesia. You see the fine grains of the pine-plank wall, smell the traces of campfire smoke in your hair, and know exactly where you are. Camp Nightingale. You close your eyes and try to drop back into sleep, doing your best to ignore the nature noise rising from outside. It’s a jarring, discordant sound—creatures of the night clashing with those of the day. You catch the drumroll of insects, the chirp of birds, a solitary loon letting out one last ghostly call that skates across the lake. The racket of the outdoors temporarily masks the silence inside. But then a woodpecker’s rat-a-tat-tat subsides into echo, and in that brief lull, you realize how quiet it is. How the only sound you’re aware of is the steady rise and fall of your own sleep-heavy breathing. Your eyes dart open again as you strain to hear something else—anything else—coming from inside the cabin. There’s nothing. The woodpecker starts up again, and its rapid jackhammering tugs you away from the wall to face the rest of the cabin. It’s a small space. Just enough room for two sets of bunk beds, a night table topped by a lantern, and four hickory trunks near the door for storage. Certainly tiny enough for you to be able to tell when it’s empty, which it is. You fling your gaze to the bunks across from you. The top one is neatly made, the sheets pulled taut. The bottom is the opposite—a tangle of blankets, something lumpy buried beneath them. You check your watch in the early half-light. It’s a few minutes past 5:00 a.m. Almost an hour until reveille. The revelation brings an undercurrent of panic that hums just beneath your skin, itchy and irritating. Emergency scenarios trot through your brain. A sudden illness. A frantic call from home. You even try to tell yourself it’s possible the girls had to leave so quickly they couldn’t be bothered to wake you. Or maybe they tried but you couldn’t be roused. Or maybe they did and you can’t remember. You kneel before the hickory trunks by the door, each one carved with names of campers past, and fling open all of them but yours. The inside of each satin-lined box is stuffed to the brim with clothes and magazines and simple camp crafts. Two of them hold cell phones, turned off, unused for days. Only one of them took her phone. You have no idea what that could mean. The first—and only—logical place you think the girls can be is the latrine, a cedar-walled rectangle just beyond the cabins, planted right at the threshold of the forest. Maybe one of them had to go to the bathroom and the others went with her. It’s happened before. You’ve taken part in similar treks. Huddled together, scurrying along a path lit by a single, shared flashlight. Yet the perfectly made bed suggests a planned absence. An extended one. Or, worse, that no one had even slept in it the night before. ## Books with a similar feel - [Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica](https://uncovered.ink/read/local-woman-missing-mary-kubica.md) - [The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-reappearance-of-rachel-price-holly-jackson.md) - [Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell](https://uncovered.ink/read/invisible-girl-lisa-jewell.md) - [The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-sun-down-motel-simone-st-james.md) - [Burn by Peter Heller](https://uncovered.ink/read/burn-peter-heller.md) - [Promise Me by Harlan Coben](https://uncovered.ink/read/promise-me-harlan-coben.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.