The Almost Truth by Eileen Cook (review)

Escape is Sadie’s main goal: she’s carefully amassed a college fund, mostly from small frauds and cons, to get to Berkeley and away from her life as a trailer-dwelling daughter of a hotel maid and a felon. When her mother takes Sadie’s money to fund lawyers for Sadie’s dad, Sadie realizes she needs a quick influx of cash if she’s to leave as planned. Spurred by Brendan (longtime friend, colleague in cons, and awkward one-time sex partner), she gets interested in the story of rich girl Ava McKenna, who disappeared from the island’s single swanky hotel when she was three and whose age-projected image looks very much like Sadie does now; Sadie’s intention is to use that resemblance to her financial advantage one way or another. As she and Brendan learn more about Ava, Sadie begins to wonder about the mysteries in her own past and her similarities to Ava—has she actually conned her way into the truth? Cook writes as usual with a smooth intelligence that invigorates her plot, and Sadie’s a diverting character. Brendan makes plausible the romantic trope of the ladykiller whose heart really only belongs to one woman, while Sadie’s unwillingness to get entangled with somebody who’s rooted in the place she’s looking to escape is also credible. The actual secret turns out to be a seriously preposterous string of events, though, and Sadie’s sudden embrace of the parents she’s now leaving behind doesn’t ring true. The end therefore makes this less satisfying than Jaffe’s similarly themed Ghost Flower (BCCB 5/12), but the tantalizing is-she-or-isn’t-she drama may involve readers in the meantime.