Too Good to Be True: A Novel

by Carola Lovering

Overview

ONE LOVE STORY. TWO MARRIAGES. THREE VERSIONS OF THE TRUTH.

Too Good to Be True is an obsessive, addictive love story for fans of Lisa Jewell and The Wife Upstairs, from Carola Lovering, the beloved author of Tell Me Lies.

Skye Starling is overjoyed when her boyfriend, Burke Michaels, proposes after a whirlwind courtship. Though Skye seems to have the world at her fingertips—she’s smart, beautiful, and from a well-off family—she’s also battled crippling OCD ever since her mother’s death when she was eleven, and her romantic relationships have suffered as a result.

But now Burke—handsome, older, and more emotionally mature than any man she’s met before—says he wants her. Forever. Except, Burke isn’t who he claims to be. And interspersed letters to his therapist reveal the truth: he’s happily married, and using Skye for his own, deceptive ends.

In a third perspective, set thirty years earlier, a scrappy seventeen-year-old named Heather is determined to end things with Burke, a local bad boy, and make a better life for herself in New York City. But can her adolescent love stay firmly in her past—or will he find his way into her future?

On a collision course she doesn’t see coming, Skye throws herself into wedding planning, as Burke’s scheme grows ever more twisted. But of course, even the best laid plans can go astray. And just when you think you know where this story is going, you’ll discover that there’s more than one way to spin the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250271372
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	288,029
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Carola Lovering is the bestselling author of the novels Tell Me Lies, Too Good to Be True, and Can’t Look Away. She is a graduate of Colorado College, and her work has appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine, W Magazine, National Geographic, Marie Claire, and Yoga Journal, among other publications. Her novel Tell Me Lies is now a television series for Hulu. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two young children.

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2021

Winsome, wealthy Manhattan book editor Skye Starling is confident she’s finally found a man able to look past her occasionally paralyzing OCD, in this Machiavellian drama from Lovering (Tell Me Lies). Ignoring her friends’ pleas to take things slower, Skye instead leaps into the arms of much older, somewhat mysterious financial consultant Burke Michaels. Skye’s mistake becomes clear as the perspective switches from the besotted young woman to that of her beau, whose description in a diary entry of their first meeting on a Montauk beach reveals him to be married and broke. But that’s just a glimpse of the head-spinningly devious plot permutations that emerge as the narration, frequently unreliable, ping-pongs between the couple and a crucial third character, who’s initially introduced in chapters set three decades earlier as Burke’s high school sweetheart. Though the true shape of the main con seems to become apparent about halfway through, a plethora of twists lies ahead. What Lovering doesn’t have are remotely credible—or, for the most part, sympathetic—central characters. Still, psychological thriller fans will keep turning the pages to see what happens next. Agent: Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Too Good To Be True:

“I raced through Too Good To Be True, desperate to see what new twist was coming next. Gripping, tantalizing, and perfectly paced, Carola Lovering somehow makes duplicity sexy––and even understandable. Get ready for a wild, seductive ride.”

––Sara Shepard, New York Times bestselling author

“A twisty tale of love, greed, betrayal and revenge. Addictive and unputdownable.”

—Michele Campbell, internationally bestselling author of A Stranger on the Beach

“Thoroughly engrossing and beautifully crafted, Too Good To Be True mesmerizingly merges seemingly unrelated lives and expertly weaves together past and present storylines. Deliciously fraught with plot twists that keep readers compulsively turning pages, this is the type of book nightlights were invented for.”

—Erica Katz, author of The Boys’ Club

“A cat and mouse thriller with masterful twists. Will leave you guessing until the last page.” — Liv Constantine, international bestselling author

From the Publisher

10/01/2020

In debut author Andrews's Who Is Maud Dixon?, Florence Darrow, assistant to pseudonymous author Maud Dixon (actually Helen Wilcox), awakens in a hospital after a terrible accident with no memory of the event and Helen missing in action—so why not take over her life (75,000-copy first printing)? In the pseudonymous Finlay's buzzy Every Last Fear, NYU student Matt Pine learns that his entire family has perished while vacationing in Mexico, and the FBI and State Department are questioning the accidental gas leak story put forth by the local police. Flynn, who as a YA author writes as L.E. Flynn, goes adult with The Girls Are All So Nice Here, as Ambrosia Wellington recalls the not-so-nice thing she did one night with former best friend Sully and receives ever more threatening missives about an event she thought was history (150,000-copy first printing). In The House Uptown, Ginsburg's follow-up to Sunset City, 14-year-old Ava winds up in New Orleans after her mother's death, living with a bohemian artist grandmother who finds Ava's presence a reminder of dark things past (50,000-copy first printing). In the latest from Lovering (Tell Me Lies), things prove to be To Good To Be True as starry-eyed Skye Starling blissfully accepts a marriage proposal from her sophisticated older boyfriend, actually a devious skunk whose dark secrets the story backtracks 30 years to reveal (150,000-copy first printing). How does upright Parisian cop Alice end up on a park bench in Central Park, New York, chained to a Dublin musician she doesn't know and in possession of a gun significantly missing a bullet? Read top French author Musso's Central Park to find out. Following Oliva's The Last One, Forget Me Not features a lonely woman still trying to make sense of her past—she was born to replace a dead sibling, escaped the 20-acre compound in Washington State where she had been pretty much abandoned, and at age 12 suddenly faced an incomprehensible world. Already grabbed by 17 territories worldwide, Sten's Scandi-set The Lost Village features documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt's efforts to chronicle the mining town whose inhabitants—save for a dead woman and an abandoned newborn—all vanished on a single day in 1959. But bad things keep happening on set (100,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal

★ 2021-01-27
The second novel from Lovering more than lives up to the promise of her debut, Tell Me Lies (2018).

Skye Starling appears to have it all—an enviable Manhattan apartment, a cool and successful book-editing job, and a pleasantly girly group of longtime friends. Still, her struggles with OCD have been a romantic-relationship deal breaker in the past. So when Skye meets the incredibly handsome Burke Michaels beachside at Montauk, the stage is seemingly set for a fairy-tale love story: Within six months they are engaged—much to the consternation of Skye’s BFF, Andie—and Skye is over the moon. But there are multiple clamoring voices in this chilling narrative that suggest all may not be well: We read Burke's diary entries, written at the behest of his marriage counselor—yup, Mr. Perfect-for-Skye already has a wife, a startling fact we learn within the early pages of the book; a former toxic boyfriend of Skye’s keeps emailing her creepy and threatening messages; and a decades-earlier narrative by Heather, Burke’s wife, confounds the dizzying plotline even further. Lovering, a master of manipulation to rival her own characters, does a skillful job of gradually unspooling her intricate tapestry of psychological intrigue while deftly juggling her multiple narratives. And neatly nested in this tale of just who is deceiving whom is a none-too-gentle critique of our system’s rigid social and economic inequities.

A nifty cat-and-mouse thriller that doesn’t stint when it comes to twists, turns, and “gotcha!” surprises.

Kirkus Reviews