46 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley ElstonFirst Lie Wins
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to misogyny, gambling, substance dependency, and terminal cancer.
Evie Porter is on the verge of moving in with her boyfriend of two months, Ryan. She struggles through a dinner party attended by Ryan’s female friends. Evie is uncomfortable with the friends’ lines of questions, one of which has Evie admitting that she met Ryan when he helped her change a flat tire. Evie reveals to the reader that she gave herself the flat in order to attract Ryan. After the guests leave, Ryan tells Evie that he feels the introduction to his friends went well, but Evie knows the women will only want to know more about her in the future. This prospect makes her uncomfortable.
Chapter 2 Summary
Evie schedules movers to come to her apartment on Thursday. This annoys Ryan because he has a mysterious work engagement on Thursdays that will keep him from helping. Evie arrives at her apartment, which is entirely empty. The movers arrive. Evie unpacks some of the boxes to make it look like she’s been living in the apartment and is now preparing to leave.
Chapter 3 Summary
Evie meets Ryan in the driveway after he gets home from work and explains that she’s almost finished moving. She lies, telling him that she’s given away most of her furniture and possessions. Ryan insists on helping her move the rest out, so they go to her apartment and box up everything Evie unboxed only hours before. As Ryan rifles through her things, Evie begins to wonder if he’s suspicious of her intentions.
Chapter 4 Summary
Later in the week, Evie goes to the UPS store. She opens a PO Box and removes a small envelope from inside.
Chapter 5 Summary
Ryan’s female friends insist that Evie goes out to lunch with them. Most of them Evie met at the dinner party. Another one, Rachel, wasn’t invited because Ryan finds her irritating. The women ask Evie about her past and she tells them a lie—that she was born in the suburbs of Tuscaloosa and that her parents died in a car crash that she barely survived. This silences the women except Rachel who presses on with more questions about what brought Evie to Lake Forbing and where she’s worked. After Rachel comments on how quickly Evie has moved into Ryan’s home, Evie calls out her implication that she’s using Ryan for his money. Lunch ends with all of the women except for Rachel and Evie feeling humiliated by this interaction. On her way out of the restaurant, Evie googles her own name and checks fake articles about the car accident that create her alibi.
Chapter 6 Summary
Ryan comes to the art gallery where Evie now works thanks to his connections. He apologizes to Evie about his friends’ intrusive questions. He then takes a tense work-related phone call about his meeting on Thursday. After, Evie calls Rachel to apologize to her for the tension at lunch and to find a time to meet one-on-one. Evie has already looked into Rachel’s background and knows that she’s a partner at a prestigious law firm. Evie thinks Rachel will pry into Evie’s past until Evie gives her the information she’s looking for.
Chapter 7 Summary
On Saturday, Ryan and Evie attend a Derby party at an expensive private venue hosted by Ryan’s friends. They meet Ryan’s friend James who is accompanied by a woman who looks eerily similar to Evie. This woman introduces herself as Lucca Marino—a name that shocks Evie. Evie asks this woman questions about where she came from, and Lucca’s answers continue to disturb her. Evie runs to the bathroom and reflects on why this interaction was so upsetting: Lucca Marino is Evie’s real name, and the past that this woman described is her own past.
Interlude 1 Summary: “Lucca Marino—Ten Years Ago”
Ten years ago, Lucca Marino—now living as Evie Porter—attends the engagement party of a wealthy older couple. She sneaks into the bride-to-be’s bedroom and steals her jewels. She escapes unnoticed.
Lucca returns home to her mother, a once-great seamstress who is dying of cancer. In order to support her mother and pay the hospital bills, 17-year-old Lucca has taken a job with a florist shop that routinely gives her access to the homes of the wealthy. Lucca uses her family’s costuming skills to change her appearance so that she can return incognito to the florist’s clients and rob them. She disassembles their jewelry and pawns it in a different state.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Present Day”
Steeling herself, Evie leaves the bathroom and finds Ryan, who is very drunk. She tries to divert his attention from the interaction with James and the Lucca imposter, hoping that he won’t remember it when the night is through. Evie chats with Ryan’s female friends about James and Lucca. She learns that James, a gambler, was helped financially by Ryan but repaid Ryan by stealing from him. On the car ride home, Ryan mentions that Lucca told him that she wants to spend more time with Evie. This unsettles Evie. Wanting to keep this memory from solidifying in Ryan’s mind, Evie has sex with Ryan in the car.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Present Day”
The next day, Evie returns to the UPS store hoping to find something in the PO Box. Her thoughts reveal that she works for an organization that sends her to infiltrate the lives of people to gather information. Evie was sent to become part of Ryan’s life to get information about what he does in East Texas on Thursdays. Evie didn’t succeed in her last job, and her failure made her an enemy of one of the organization’s clients—Victor Connolly, the head of a large crime family. Evie knows she needs to do well in this job to maintain her safety. She hopes that the organization will have sent her some information about the Lucca-imposter’s arrival. She finds the PO Box empty. Evie considers that the organization itself might have sent the Lucca-imposter. Evie has an emergency-only number she can call as a last resort, but she decides against calling.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
First Lie Wins uses the first-person point of view in the present tense. The first-person present tense allows for a sense of immediacy that is beneficial to the thriller genre. Thrillers rely on a propulsive, pacey plot that keeps the reader turning pages. Evie’s first-person narration allows the reader intimate access to the anxious emotional state she’s in because of the in-progress con. It also keeps the narration focused on Evie’s emotions and the actions she takes in the moment. The use of first-person also keeps the reader tightly focused on the character who drives the plot, helping to create a sense of narrative urgency.
Evie’s first-person perspective allows the narrative to withhold information from the reader, necessary to create mystery and suspense. Evie doesn’t reveal everything she knows about a situation right away, as would be natural in an internal monologue that avoids unnecessary exposition. Elston’s choice of perspective is partially a function of characterization: Evie is only able to succeed in her line of work because of her intensely guarded secrecy and the narrative highlights the hidden nature of Evie’s internal life. The slow reveal of information via the first-person narration is also part of how Elston creates narrative tension. In the opening scenes of the novel, for instance, it’s revealed that Evie is an imposter who has tricked her way into Ryan’s confidence. Evie doesn’t reveal, though, why she’s doing this. This lack of information allows the reader to speculate about her motives: What does she want from Ryan? What will she do to Ryan once she’s achieved her goal? Allowing the reader to sit with such questions is a primary way in which Elston creates suspense. This withholding of Evie’s fuller character and background helps to set up the theme of The Malleability of Identity in this first section. The reader is made aware early on that Evie adopts multiple external identities: This fluidity is mirrored by the slipperiness of Evie’s internal character as presented to the reader. Besides the thriller plot, the opening chapters show that the novel’s narrative drive will depend on the reader’s developing understanding of the protagonist.
This first section of the novel takes place largely in the suburban setting of Ryan’s neighborhood. The is the first way that the theme of Community as a Source of Power is introduced. Evie has a deeply conflicted relationship with suburbia and the people who occupy it. She craves a life like the one these people lead, feeling envy for “the gracefulness that comes with knowing that everyone in this town has seen them at their worst and still accepts them” (2). Conversely, Evie is deeply scornful of the superficial conformity that suburban women must enact in order to assimilate. After her first meeting with Ryan’s friends, Ryan comforts Evie by insisting that his friends loved her; Evie internally dissents, saying:
They don’t love me. At most, I satisfied the first wave of their curiosity. And I imagine before the first car left the driveway, every woman was in the passenger seat swiping between the group text message picking apart every aspect of the night (5).
Here, Evie characterizes the social dynamic of suburban women as having an intense public/private divide that is used to ostracize people. This dynamic is especially apparent to Evie as an outsider: She is very aware of how artifice and the construction of an outward-facing identity can be both powerful and harmful. Evie’s ambivalent attitude to suburbia will shift over the course of the narrative as Evie gains a surer footing in Ryan’s life and, by extension, the world of suburban women.
