The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,244

of the circumstances, and we all pulled together to make it work. I’m also grateful to Kristin Marang for her web and cross-promotional genius—I don’t know what I’d do without you! Huge kudos to everyone working on The Lying Game TV show, including Gina Girolamo, Andrew Wang, Charles Pratt Jr., and all of the other amazing writers, producers, and crew—not to mention the lovely Alexandra Chando, who plays the best Sutton and Emma I could imagine. I’m so excited to see what twists and turns are next!

Most of all, a big thanks to Katie Sise—without you, this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

CREDITS

Cover photo © 2012 by Gustavo Marx/Merge Left Reps, Inc.

Cover design by Liz Dresner

COPYRIGHT

HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

Copyright © 2012 by Alloy Entertainment and Sara Shepard

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

Produced by Alloy Entertainment

151 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

ISBN 978-0-06-186974-7 (trade bdg.)

ISBN 978-0-06-213007-5 (int. ed.)

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 978006208414

Design by Liz Dresner

11 12 13 14 15 LP/BV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

Dedication

To Lanie

Epigraph

Cherish those who seek the truth

but beware of those who find it.

—VOLTAIRE

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue Dead Like Me

1. Don’t Feed the Earthlings

2. To Grandmother’s House We Go

3. Volleying with the Enemy

4. The Ungiving Tree

5. The Devious Four

6. Evidence Locker

7. Can You Hear Me Now?

8. A Brush with Danger

9. That’s One Way to Win

10. Smoking Gun

11. Too Hot to Handle

12. Track Meet

13. Grandmothers Know Best

14. Racketeering

15. The Birthday Surprise

16. Another One Bites the Dust

17. Hit and Run

18. Watch Your Back

19. One Big Unhappy Family

20. Where It All Began

21. Wandering Minds

22. Play Along

23. The Rattlesnake in the Room

24. Mano a Mano

25. Midnight Snack

26. Call the Doctor

27. This Means War

28. Breaking and Entering

29. Motel Hell

30. Diner Dash

31. A Fateful Goodbye

32. Grandfather Clause

33. She’s Back

34. Mama Drama

Acknowledgments

Credits

Copyright

PROLOGUE

DEAD LIKE ME

I’d always thought the afterlife would be like an eternal stay at a resort on St. Barts—hot French waiters bringing me fruity drinks until the end of time, the azure Caribbean sky in a permanent sunset, a cool ocean breeze tickling my forever tanned skin. It would be my reward for living a full, fabulous, long life.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Instead I died days before my eighteenth birthday and what was supposed to be an amazing senior year. And rather than sipping a mojito on a white-sand beach, I woke up in Las Vegas, tethered to a twin sister I never knew I had. I watched as Emma Paxton was forced into my life and had to begin impersonating me. I watched as she sat at my place at the table with my family and giggled with my friends, pretending she’d known them forever. I watched her read my journal, sleep in my bed, and try to figure out who killed me.

And I seemed to be stuck here until further notice. Everywhere Emma went, I went, too. Everything she knew, I knew as well—the problem was, I didn’t know much beyond that. My life before I died was a question mark. Certain things have come back to me—like how I wasn’t exactly the nicest girl at Hollier High, how I took for granted all the things I’d been given in life, and how I’d made plenty of enemies by playing vicious pranks on people who didn’t deserve it. But everything else was a blank, including how I died, and who murdered me.

One thing I did know was that my killer was now watching Emma’s every move right along with me, making sure that she plays along. I was a breath away when Emma found a note saying I was dead and warning her that if she didn’t pretend to be me, she’d be dead, too. I felt the stars explode behind Emma’s eyes when she was nearly strangled during a sleepover at my best friend Charlotte’s house. I had a front-row seat when a light fixture in the school’s auditorium careened toward her head. They were all warnings. My killer had been so close. And yet, neither of us had