All the Lies

A friend handed me the Mindfck series with a warning that book four would make me mad at people I liked. She was right. I had burned through The Risk, Sidetracked, and Scarlet Angel in a few nights, telling myself the books were too short to count as a binge. Then I opened All the Lies on a Sunday afternoon and did not move until the light went flat. It is short, 141 pages in the December 2016 indie edition from S.T. Abby, book four in the Mindfck series, and it is the one where love and lies stop sharing a bed comfortably.

The facts first, because this series gets tangled online. All the Lies by S.T. Abby was self published in 2016, released December 20, 2016, as Mindf*ck book four after Scarlet Angel and before Paint It All Red. The digital edition runs 141 pages with no standard ISBN, matching series mates The Risk and Scarlet Angel. Like the earlier volumes, it is indie published under the author name rather than through a large house. You should read the books in order. The Risk is book one, Sidetracked book two, Scarlet Angel book three, then here, then the finale. Starting here would spoil three books of slow reveals in a few chapters.

A content note before plot, because it shapes whether you should read this at all. This is dark romance for adults with thriller structure. The central motive reaches back to sexual assault from about ten years earlier. The book refers to that history in flashbacks and present choices without staging assault for shock, and I will keep it that way here. What is on the page in present time is planned killing, FBI procedure, grief, stalking behavior from offenders, and explicit consensual scenes between adults. If those topics are difficult for you now, skip this volume or wait for a steadier time. The story can be followed without graphic detail, and that is how I have written this summary.

Lana Myers has lived two lives for most of the series. By day she is quiet, funny in a dry way, good at remembering how Logan takes his coffee and which colleague needs a birthday card. By night she has worked through a list of men she holds responsible for past harm to herself and people she loved. Logan Bennett is the FBI agent assigned to the serial cases she created. He met her by chance, fell for her fast, brought her into his work as a sounding board, and trusted her while his team chased patterns she understood from the inside. By the end of book three, trust had thinned. He notices too much to stay easy. She loves him too much to run clean. All the Lies opens with that pressure at full heat, and much of it sits inside his head.

Logan stops trusting his own judgment

Book four shifts weight toward Logan, and the change lands hard. Earlier books let Lana carry most pages with her careful plans and her erasures. Here Logan narrates long stretches, and he is not a fool. He prides himself on reading liars. He has built a career on sorting truth from performance in interview rooms. With Lana, that skill goes soft, and he knows it, which makes him angry at himself before he is angry at her.

He tells himself families of truths in this town do not add up. Every time he finds a solid fact, another one slides out from under it. People who seemed kind cover for each other. Records have gaps where there should be paper. A sheriff smiles too long. A neighbor remembers too little. Logan feels his gut twist in those meetings, the way it does when a witness rehearses. His heart beats faster because each new fact makes the place look worse, not better, and he hates it a little more each visit.

The worst part for him is not the town. It is Lana. He catches small slips and files them. Why does she know a detail that was never in the files he shared. Why does she go still at certain dates. Why does her phone go dark on nights when bodies turn up two counties over. He asks gently and accepts answers he would never accept from anyone else. Love wants to trust. Training says verify. He lives between those orders for most of this book, and Abby writes that split without making him stupid. He is competent everywhere except with her, which reads human rather than staged. We all turn off alarms for beloveds. Agents included.

There is a short scene I kept rereading. Logan cooks while Lana talks about a future with a house and slow mornings. He watches her hands while she talks. Steady. Scarred. Washing a mug twice. He wants the picture she paints so much that he lets the extra wash go. Later, alone in his car, he writes the detail down anyway. That habit, loving her at the table and logging her after, is the whole book in miniature.

Going home with Jake

The middle of the book leaves the city for Lana hometown with Jake beside her, and the air changes. Jake is her best friend and the one person who knows the full ledger without flinching. He has his own grief tied to the same years, and he covers her the way siblings cover, with jokes over fear. They drive in with a plan that is part revenge and part theater, and the town gives them plenty of stage.

This is the place that failed them. Ten years earlier, men with standing used friendship and power as cover, and neighbors looked away. Police wrote things down wrong. Parents were told to keep quiet for the good of everyone. A brother and a father figure into that old harm in ways the book reveals through italic flashbacks and present confrontations, and I will leave names and specifics light here because the shock is not the point. The point is pattern. The same names repeat on teams, in offices, at church picnics. The same shrug meets each new complaint.

Lana and Jake answer that shrug with fear of their own. They use a timed paint they mixed to mark houses, cars, and doors of people who buried complaints. It goes on clear and shows color hours later, so blame floats while guilt settles. Cops wake to red doors. A deacon finds his porch tagged. A former coach finds his truck lettered. No one is hurt in these scenes, but everyone is warned. Watching a town that prized quiet wake up stained is grimly satisfying on first pass, then sadder on second thought, because paint does not fix records. It only proves the painter was there.

The local police respond the way exposed departments do. They lean on Logan team to back off, claim jurisdiction, slow paper, suggest the feds are chasing ghosts to harass good families. They start watching Logan people at motels and diners. Lana protects Logan inside that squeeze without telling him she is doing it, steering him away from stops where locals wait, texting him to take another road. She almost gives herself away twice by knowing which cars follow. Love makes her careless in the exact way her plans cannot afford.

One thread I found strong is how Hadley and other familiar faces read in this stretch. People who liked Lana in the city see a harder edge when she talks about home. Jake jokes less. Lana smiles less. The mask of normal girlfriend slips because home does not allow masks. That slip is what Logan finally sees clearly, and it scares him more than any map.

The list narrows

Between hometown scenes, the revenge plot moves. Lana targets men tied to the old harm who have lived clean public lives since. She tracks them through work schedules, bar habits, and public records. She uses cash, gloves, wigs, and alibis built from normal life. The book keeps these crimes quick on the page rather than savored. Planning gets pages. Aftermath gets pages. The act itself is brief, which keeps focus on cost rather than method.

After, she shakes in cars. She vomits behind a garage once and wipes her mouth with a sleeve that still smells of Logan soap. Then she drives home to him and asks about his day like nothing happened. That comedown matters more than any trick. Bodies handled efficiently. Feelings not at all.

The FBI side tightens in parallel. Task force maps fill with pins, some hers, some tied to a separate killer the team calls the Boogeyman. Similar victim types blur under fatigue. Different signatures confuse tired eyes. Lana sits in rooms where agents argue profiles and offers accurate insights that misdirect by emphasis. She suggests task splits that protect her zones while sounding procedural. That manipulation of good police work from inside the room is the series most uncomfortable thrill. Readers root for cops and criminal both because both are right about different halves.

Logan runs quiet checks he hates himself for. Timeline gaps. A receipt that places her near a highway at a bad hour. Knowledge slips about a victim he never named. He does not tell his team yet. He tells himself he is protecting an innocent woman from office gossip while knowing he is protecting himself from an answer. Abby lets that self lie sit without speeches. He brings Lana pie from his mother. He holds her while she cries about nothing she can name. He logs the crying too.

Book four is also where the flashbacks hit hardest. Abby warns readers to skip italic blocks if triggers run hot, and the warning is earned. The scenes show grooming, coercion, and violence from ten years ago without lingering for thrill. They explain why adult Lana cannot stop even as love offers reasons to pause. The story holds if you skim. Present choices carry the weight. What was done is clear enough. What she does now is the question.

The break

The late break between Lana and Logan hurt to read, which is why the book sticks. After pages of circling, Logan stops circling. He confronts her with what he has logged, not all at once but in pieces, testing if she will fill gaps. She tries. She tells more truth than ever before about the town, the cover ups, the names, the nights. He hears her. He believes too much of it to dismiss and too little of it to act clean.

Then he does the thing readers argue about after. After intimacy that feels like repair, he restrains her to the bed with handcuffs, tells her to stay quiet while he thinks, and leaves her alone to sort his orders. On the page it reads fast and cold. He means it as control, not cruelty. Keep her still. Keep her safe. Keep the case from running while he decides which man he is. To Lana, who has spent books fearing silence more than cuffs, it lands as the worst choice he could make. Being silenced was the original harm. Now the one person she trusted to hear her repeats it.

I hated him for three chapters. Then I hated the town more for putting that choice in his hands. That split feels planned. Abby does not frame him as villain or hero in those pages. He is a man who follows rules when rules have already failed the woman he loves, and the rules cut them both. Lana does not forgive fast. She does not forget at all. She gets free, because of course she does, and the freedom tastes like ash. Their talks after are careful and bruised. Future houses sound farther away. Dogs and porches sound like stories for other people.

What saves the stretch from melodrama is detail. Logan brings water he does not offer right. Lana counts ceiling tiles instead of screaming. A phone buzzes in another room through two scenes and neither moves to answer it. Small failures pile higher than speeches. Love does not vanish. It goes quiet and watches.

What works and what strains

The engine here is pace and dread. Short chapters. Dual voices. A town that keeps producing new lies each time Logan pulls one loose. I read the last hundred pages standing in my kitchen because sitting felt too calm. The paint plot gives the middle a shape earlier books lacked, a visible mark of hidden work that pays off in town meeting scenes where neighbors shout at each other instead of at Lana. Those meetings ring true. Guilt turns outward fast when doors are stained.

Fair criticism belongs too. The middle sags when procedure repeats. Task force briefings blur together. Whiteboards, coffee, maps, the same argument about signatures three times with new dates. One more interview where a local says nothing in many words would have been enough. The book also asks Logan to miss connections longer than his training allows. He is sharp with strangers and soft with Lana past the point where soft reads kind. It reads love-blind, which fits theme, but twice I wanted to shake him. You logged the receipt. Act like it.

Short length cuts both ways. At 141 pages, nothing wastes time, but trust builds fast and breaks fast. Lana forgives tactical ground quickly to keep plot moving. Jake appears and steadies scenes, then vanishes when pages run out. The finale hook arrives before some hometown threads settle, which is series design, yet this volume feels most like a bridge. Strong bridge. Still a bridge.

Triggers need care beyond the standard note. Beyond past assault as motive and present killing, there is stalking behavior from offenders, grief after loss, and police intimidation that may feel close for some readers. Present consent between Lana and Logan is written with care. He asks. She sets terms. Past violation is never eroticized. That line holds even when flashbacks intensify. If the line matters to you, as it should, the book respects it while testing comfort hard.

Hook, not close

The ending is a hook into the finale rather than a close, so calibrate expectations. Targets remain. The town has named its enemy without naming her. Logan team has paper that will not stay quiet. Lana list shortens but does not end. The last chapters stage a near miss where Logan almost catches her in act and chooses one more time to trust her explanation over his log. Readers will shout at his kindness. That shout is the series engine. How long can love fund doubt. One book left to answer.

What stays with me is not a twist but a question about being heard. Lana could bear pain, risk, even prison. What she could not bear was being silenced again, by the town at fifteen or by Logan at twenty five. The title fits that ache. Lies told about her mattered less than lies told to keep her quiet. When she finally speaks at length about what happened and who covered it, the scene runs long and plain, no tricks, and it carries more force than any paint or plan. Listen, the book says. Then decide what justice allows.

Read it after Scarlet Angel, not alone. Keep trigger care front and center. Skim flashbacks if needed. The story survives. Watch for ledger details, burner phones, and paint timing. When Logan cooks breakfast, notice Lana hands. Steady. Scarred. Washing twice. Those hands tell the whole series without a word. Then go straight to Paint It All Red. The finale pays off threads this book leaves hot, and you will want answers the night you finish, not next month.