In an era where curated Instagram feeds masquerade as reality and influencer culture has become a multibillion-dollar industry, Jo Piazza delivers a scathing and thrilling exposé disguised as a page-turning murder mystery. Everyone Is Lying to You doesn’t just entertain—it excavates the rotten foundation beneath the glossy veneer of social media perfection, revealing truths so uncomfortable they’ll make you question everything you’ve ever double-tapped.
A Murder That Exposes More Than Blood
The Setup: When Friendship Meets Influence
Piazza crafts her narrative around two women whose lives have diverged dramatically since college. Lizzie Matthews, a struggling magazine writer drowning in the mundane chaos of modern motherhood, receives an unexpected lifeline from her former best friend Rebecca “Bex” Sommers. But this isn’t the wild, ambitious Bex from their university days—this is @BarefootMamaLove, a tradwife influencer with millions of followers who worship her picture-perfect ranch life with husband Gray and their five photogenic children.
The premise appears straightforward: old friends reconnecting, career opportunity, exclusive interview. Yet Piazza immediately signals that nothing in this world operates at surface level. The very invitation feels calculated, orchestrated, almost predatory in its timing.
The Unraveling: Violence in Paradise
When Grayson Sommers is found brutally murdered in his barn and Rebecca vanishes without a trace, the story explodes beyond typical thriller conventions. Piazza doesn’t simply present a whodunit—she dissects the entire ecosystem that enabled the tragedy. The MomBomb influencer conference becomes a pressure cooker where jealousy, ambition, and desperation simmer beneath designer smiles and ring lights.
Character Complexity: More Than Instagram Archetypes
Lizzie: The Everywoman’s Descent
Lizzie Matthews emerges as Piazza’s most relatable creation—a woman caught between professional ambition and domestic reality, scrolling through others’ highlight reels while her own life feels increasingly small. Her character arc from passive observer to active investigator mirrors our collective relationship with social media: we consume, we judge, we yearn, but rarely do we truly see.
Piazza’s decision to make Lizzie both unreliable narrator and determined journalist creates fascinating tension. Her desperation for a career breakthrough clouds her judgment, making readers question whether she’s uncovering truth or manufacturing it for her own benefit.
Rebecca: The Prisoner of Perfection
The gradual revelation of Rebecca’s reality—that the woman who appeared to have everything was actually trapped in an abusive marriage, financially supporting a controlling husband while maintaining the facade of traditional submission—represents Piazza’s most damning indictment of influencer culture. Rebecca’s transformation from college rebel to digital stepford wife isn’t just character development; it’s a cautionary tale about the price of algorithmic approval.
The Puppet Master: Olivia Jackson
Perhaps the novel’s most intriguing figure is Olivia Jackson, the mysterious manager/accountant/manipulator who orchestrates events from the shadows. Piazza creates in Olivia a character who embodies the dark side of the attention economy—someone who profits from others’ carefully curated trauma while remaining essentially invisible herself.
The Art of Social Media Satire
Authentic Inauthenticity
Piazza demonstrates intimate knowledge of influencer culture, from the exhausting performance of daily content creation to the behind-the-scenes machinery that turns personal moments into profit. Her descriptions of sponsored posts, engagement metrics, and brand partnerships feel surgically precise, suggesting deep research into this world.
The author’s background as creator of the “Under the Influence” podcast clearly informs her writing. She captures the specific language, rhythms, and psychology of social media addiction with uncomfortable accuracy. When Lizzie finds herself compulsively checking her suddenly exploding follower count during a murder investigation, it feels both absurd and entirely believable.
The Economics of Exploitation
One of the novel’s strongest elements is its examination of how influence monetizes femininity, motherhood, and vulnerability. Piazza reveals the financial infrastructure behind the aspirational content, showing how companies profit from women’s insecurities while maintaining plausible deniability about their role in perpetuating harmful standards.
Plot Mechanics: Ambitious but Uneven
Strengths in Structure
The novel’s dual timeline approach—alternating between the present-day investigation and Rebecca’s gradual entrapment—creates effective dramatic irony. Readers understand Rebecca’s desperation long before other characters do, which adds layers of tension to every interaction.
Piazza’s decision to include multiple epilogues provides necessary closure while highlighting how easily truth can be commodified and repackaged for consumption. The revelation that everyone involved has found ways to profit from the tragedy feels both cynical and entirely plausible.
Areas Where the Formula Shows
However, the novel occasionally succumbs to thriller conventions that feel less sophisticated than its social commentary. Some plot twists rely on characters withholding information in ways that serve dramatic purposes more than psychological authenticity. The final confrontation, while satisfying on a visceral level, doesn’t quite match the intellectual complexity of the story’s setup.
The revelation about Veronica Smith’s role in orchestrating events feels somewhat rushed, though her character’s transformation from victim to manipulator aligns with the novel’s themes about how trauma can breed complicity.
Writing Style: Authentically Digital
Voice and Pace
Piazza adopts a conversational, almost compulsive narrative voice that mirrors social media consumption patterns. Her sentences flow with the addictive quality of scrolling through feeds—short bursts of information, sudden revelations, constant forward momentum. This stylistic choice makes the reading experience feel appropriately unsettling and modern.
The author excels at capturing the specific anxieties of digital life: the fear of being left behind, the pressure to perform happiness, the way online relationships both connect and isolate us simultaneously.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel functions as both entertainment and cultural criticism, examining how social media has changed not just how we present ourselves but how we form relationships, make decisions, and understand reality. Piazza’s insights about the psychological toll of constant performance feel particularly timely.
Thematic Depth: Beyond the Algorithm
The Cost of Connection
At its core, Everyone Is Lying to You explores how digital connections can substitute for genuine intimacy while ultimately leaving us more isolated than before. The friendship between Lizzie and Rebecca serves as a microcosm for how social media relationships operate—built on carefully curated presentations rather than authentic understanding.
Power Structures in Digital Spaces
The novel’s examination of who profits from influencer culture reveals disturbing parallels to traditional media exploitation. Olivia Jackson’s character represents the largely invisible financial infrastructure that monetizes women’s content while keeping them dependent on systems they don’t fully control.
The Violence of Perfection
Perhaps most powerfully, Piazza demonstrates how the pressure to maintain perfect online personas can enable real-world violence. Rebecca’s inability to reveal her abuse stems not just from shame but from her brand requirements—admitting to marital problems would destroy her carefully constructed identity and livelihood.
Literary Context and Comparisons
Contemporary Crime Fiction
Everyone Is Lying to You joins a growing subgenre of mysteries that use social media as both setting and weapon. Like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10, it combines domestic suspense with commentary on contemporary gender dynamics.
However, Piazza’s focus on influencer culture gives her work a particularly current edge. While Flynn examined media manipulation in traditional forms, Piazza shows how social platforms have democratized both influence and exploitation.
Piazza’s Literary Evolution
This novel represents a significant departure from Piazza’s previous work, including The Sicilian Inheritance and We Are Not Like Them (co-authored with Christine Pride). While those books explored family dynamics and social issues, Everyone Is Lying to You demonstrates her ability to blend commercial thriller elements with incisive cultural criticism.
The author’s journalistic background clearly informs her research and world-building, but she shows growing confidence in handling multiple narrative threads and complex character motivations.
Critical Assessment: Accomplishments and Limitations
What Works Brilliantly
The novel succeeds most completely as cultural critique disguised as entertainment. Piazza’s understanding of influencer psychology feels authentic and deeply researched, making her fictional world entirely believable. Her ability to generate sympathy for characters trapped in systems they’ve helped create demonstrates sophisticated moral complexity.
The pacing maintains thriller momentum while allowing space for social commentary, a difficult balance that Piazza manages effectively. Readers genuinely care about solving the mystery while absorbing lessons about digital culture.
Where It Falls Short
Some character motivations feel underdeveloped, particularly in the novel’s final act. The resolution, while satisfying, doesn’t quite earn its dramatic implications through sufficient psychological groundwork. Certain plot devices—convenient coincidences, overheard conversations, perfectly timed discoveries—feel more mechanical than organic.
The novel’s ambitions occasionally exceed its execution, particularly in balancing multiple themes without losing narrative focus. Some metaphors about authentic versus performed identity become heavy-handed in later chapters.
Cultural Impact and Relevance
Timely Social Commentary
Everyone Is Lying to You arrives at a moment when influencer culture faces increasing scrutiny. Recent scandals involving family vloggers, wellness gurus, and lifestyle influencers have exposed the potential for exploitation inherent in monetizing personal life. Piazza’s fictional scenarios feel uncomfortably plausible.
The novel’s examination of how violence can hide behind aspirational content speaks to broader concerns about social media’s role in enabling abuse while providing perpetrators with platforms for image management.
Future Implications
As artificial intelligence makes content creation easier and more manipulative, Piazza’s warnings about the relationship between authenticity and performance become increasingly relevant. Her speculation about AI-generated babies and completely fabricated lifestyles may seem extreme now but feels prophetic.
Similar Reads for Mystery Lovers
For readers who enjoyed Everyone Is Lying to You, consider these complementary titles:
- The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides – Psychological thriller with unreliable narrators
- Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty – Domestic secrets in seemingly perfect communities
- The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman – Character-driven mystery with social commentary
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – Media manipulation and marriage deception
- The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn – Psychological suspense with social media elements
- Such a Pretty Girl by Laura Wiess – Explores hidden abuse behind perfect facades
- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid – Celebrity culture and image construction
Final Verdict: Imperfect but Important
Everyone Is Lying to You doesn’t achieve perfection as either thriller or social commentary, but its ambitions and insights make it valuable reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary digital culture. Piazza’s ability to embed serious criticism within entertaining fiction creates accessibility without sacrificing intellectual rigor.
The novel functions as both warning and mirror, showing us how easily we become complicit in systems that exploit the very connections we seek. It suggests that in our hyperconnected age, the most dangerous lies aren’t the ones influencers tell their audiences—they’re the ones we tell ourselves about what constitutes authentic human relationship.
While the mystery mechanics sometimes creak under the weight of cultural commentary, Piazza’s vision remains compelling and necessary. Everyone Is Lying to You earns its place among contemporary fiction that wrestles with technology’s impact on human behavior, even if it doesn’t solve all the puzzles it raises.
For readers seeking entertainment that challenges as much as it thrills, Piazza delivers a story that will linger long after its final revelation. In our current moment of digital reckoning, that kind of uncomfortable insight feels both timely and essential.
