What is the title of your latest release?
PLEASE DON’T LIE
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
PLEASE DON’T LIE is a twisty, stylish thriller set in the rugged and beautiful Adirondack Mountains. The novel follows Hayley Stone, a young woman hoping to rebuild her life after a series of devastating losses. Newly married, she moves with her husband to a remote mountain town where she’s determined to leave her past behind. But as secrets begin to surface—hers, her husband’s, and those of her new community—Hayley discovers that starting over isn’t as simple as she hoped. A taut exploration of betrayal and survival, PLEASE DON’T LIE unravels the devastating truths we hide from others—and ourselves—when everything is at stake.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
We were looking for a setting that felt rich with atmosphere. Anne has lived in the Berkshires, Christina has a home in Maine, and we’ve both spent a lot of time in upstate New York. So when we imagined Crystal River, the fictional town at the center of Please Don’t Lie, we were able to draw on real places while inventing freely. It’s a town simmering with secrets and claustrophobic intensity – an ideal backdrop for a psychological thriller.
Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Christina: We would happily hang out with both Megan and Hayley, though maybe not at the same time. As we wrote these characters, we grew to like them both in very different ways. Hayley is empathetic and searching, someone you’d want to sit with on a porch and talk late into the night. Megan is sharp, funny, and a little inscrutable – you’d have a great time, but you might keep one eye open. Together, they’re a complicated pair, but that’s what made writing them so compelling.
What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Searching, loyal, haunted (Hayley)
Clever, ambitious, complicated (Megan)
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
Christina: That writing a thriller is as much about what you withhold as what you reveal. Crafting suspense means learning to plant clues, create misdirection, and let tension build slowly. We also learned how much fun it is to collaborate: working together, we were constantly surprising each other, which kept the writing fresh and full of energy.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Christina: For us, momentum is everything in a first draft. We try not to over-edit as we go, because it’s easy to get stuck perfecting a single chapter instead of driving the story forward. Our goal is to get the bones of the book down first – then we go back and revise together, layering in texture, tightening the plot, and deepening the characters.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Christina: I’m a huge fan of omakase, those multi-course sushi experiences where you put yourself entirely in the chef’s hands. There’s something almost meditative about it: the quiet attention to detail, the unfolding of each course like a story, the sense that you’re part of something ephemeral and artful. It’s elegant, surprising, and indulgent in the best way.
Anne: Every once in a long while there’s a dish you’re served at a restaurant – it could be any cuisine, any style, anywhere – where everything comes together and the taste and experience of that bite haunts you forever. Maybe this has happened a handful of times, but I love lingering over the memory of those moments. Most recently it happened to me at a bistro in Sonoma, California, in the form of a single perfect scoop of strawberry gelato, made with strawberries picked that same day right outside the door. Creamy sweet-tart flavor bomb perfection.
Describe your writing space/office!
Christina: We go back and forth between our two New York City apartments in South Harlem, writing at our dining tables. Both spaces are light-filled and comfortable, with plenty of bookshelves and good coffee. We make each other soup and salad for lunch. It’s a flexible setup, but it works – wherever we are, we read aloud, revise, and hash things out across the table.
Who is an author you admire?
Anne: Tana French has had a big influence on our approach to writing thrillers. Her books are deeply atmospheric, and her characters are psychologically complex in ways that feel both recognizable and mysterious. Her Dublin Murder Squad series inspired us to populate our Crystal River novels with recurring characters who take turns as protagonists from book to book.
Christina: Megan Abbott writes psychological thrillers that are tense, atmospheric, and deeply rooted in the interior lives of women. I love how she plays with power dynamics; the danger in her books often comes from within relationships between friends, sisters, mothers and daughters. Dare Me in particular was a touchstone for me. Abbott manages to make every interaction charged, every line of dialogue a possible threat. That kind of slow-burn suspense is something Anne and I wanted to explore in PLEASE DON’T LIE.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Anne: Books from childhood that I read five, ten times come to mind – books that made me love them so much more than real life and taught me, through rereading, what a satisfying novel looked like, sounded like, and felt like. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett is one of those books. The story of Sara Crewe losing her father and his fortune, forced by the cruel headmistress of her boarding school in London to live in the attic and work as a servant with a mouse for her best friend and nothing but her very vivid imagination to keep her going, never failed to captivate me. I read it twice again to my daughter when she was little. Now it’s one of her touchstones too.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
Anne: Every time one of my books has been accepted for publication it feels miraculous. Someone other than me believes in this book! An entire publishing company wants to invest in making this book the best it can be! Booksellers will make this book available to readers! It continues to be magical to me. With PLEASE DON’T LIE, it felt doubly exciting: Christina and I had been entertaining and surprising each other with the world we built together for months and wondered, as you do when you’re deep down a rabbit hole of your own making, if anyone else would ever love this story as much as we did. I’m grateful for all the advanced readers who’ve shared that they do.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Contemporary fiction by women. Psychological thrillers by women. Memoirs by women. Historical fiction by women. Classic literature by women. We like books by (some) men too! Truth is, if the voice of the writer grabs our attention and the way she uses sentences sparks excitement, any genre works.
What’s your favorite movie?
Anne: I love a truly great movie musical. Cabaret, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain. An American in Paris (including the absolutely insane dream ballet). Anytime one of these is on television, I can’t pull myself away.
Christina: That’s so funny, Anne – Cabaret is the only movie I’ve ever actually bought (not rented) on Netflix!
What is your favorite season?
Anne: Fall. Love the burst of back-to-school energy, love the weather.
Christina: Same!
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Anne: My partner’s birthday is two weeks before mine so every year we pick a Broadway show and buy tickets for the weekend in between both of ours as a gift to each other. And this year my birthday coincides with the launch of PLEASE DON’T LIE so we’ll be celebrating with Christina and her husband as we kick off our book tour in Maine.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
The HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. A completely different experience than reading the books, but equally immersive and thought-provoking. Watching the two main characters, Lenu and Lila, evolve through the three actresses who played each of them at different ages, is breathtaking. The casting is wonderful, the locations are stunning, and the story all-encompassing. Best to read the whole Neapolitan Quartet and then binge the whole series.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Christina: All kinds of Asian food. The flavors are bold and layered, the ingredients fresh, and there’s such a wide range of textures and spices. Whether it’s Thai, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Chinese, I’m drawn to the complexity and balance: sweet, salty, sour, spicy.
Anne: I could eat Mediterranean cuisine every night of the week. Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Moroccan, Spanish – lots of grilled and roasted earthy vegetables, fresh fish and pasta, olives, capers, vinegars, lemons. And wines from the same regions to match.
What do you do when you have free time?
We both like to read, especially novels. But in fresh locations, whether on vacation or in new corners of our home city, New York. Walk a lot, often in search of those new corners to curl up and read more novels.
What can readers expect from you next?
We’re deep into writing the second of our Crystal River-based psychological thrillers, featuring some familiar faces from PLEASE DON’T LIE as well as new characters with new secrets to mine. Look for Watch Her Lie (working title) in late 2026/early 2027! We are each at work on our own solo projects too: Christina’s forthcoming novel, THE FOURSOME, will be out in Spring 2026 and Anne is finishing a draft of her next novel, THE FEATHER PALACE.
PLEASE DON’T LIE by Anne Burt, Christina Baker Kline
A Thriller
In this stylish, twisty thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline and award-winning author Anne Burt, a young woman heads to the Adirondacks with her new husband for a fresh start—but the past won’t let her go.
Two years ago, Hayley Stone lost everything. First, her parents died in a devastating fire. Then, her sister overdosed, leaving Hayley alone and hounded by a media circus that turned her family’s tragedy into tabloid fodder. When her new husband suggests a fresh start in the Adirondacks, the promise of anonymity in an isolated mountain town feels like salvation.
But the mountains hold darker secrets than she ever imagined.
Her once-loving husband grows distant and volatile. The widow down the road keeps spewing vague accusations. Not even their new friends—a free-spirited couple living on the property—can help Hayley shake the creeping sense that something is off.
As winter edges closer, Hayley discovers that her sanctuary is anything but safe. Trapped and isolated, she faces a terrifying truth: in trying to escape her past, she may have run straight into something far more dangerous.
Women’s Fiction | Thriller Domestic [Amazon Publishing, On Sale: September 1, 2025, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781662524400 / ]
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About Anne Burt
Anne Burt‘s debut novel, The Dig, is a March 2023 American Booksellers’ Association Indie Next pick and the Strand Bookstore’s mystery selection of the month. Anne is also the editor of My Father Married Your Mother: Dispatches from the Blended Family and coeditor, with Christina Baker Kline, of About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror. Her essays and fiction have appeared in numerous publications and venues, including Salon, NPR, and The Christian Science Monitor; she is a past winner of Meridian’s Editors’ Prize in Fiction. Anne graduated from Yale in 1989 with a BA in history, and from NYU in 1997 with an MFA in creative writing. She lives in New York City.
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About Christina Baker Kline
Christina Baker Kline is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, and the author and/or editor of five nonfiction books. She is published in more than 40 countries; her books are taught in universities, colleges, and high schools.
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