** spoiler alert ** 
 This is more of an overall series review than a review of just this book since I read the whole series in one shot and did not do separate reviews for each book - so be warned! I read this series right after finishing the Pretty Little Liars series, so I kind of had somewhat high expectations for this set. That being said, I didn't always enjoy PLL, but I figured this was a shorter series (6 books versus 16) so maybe the author had learned to cut out the fluff and stick to the actual plot. PLL had an amazingly intricate plotline where nearly every storyline ended up interconnected, especially when you considered the prequel to that series. I was hoping for the same with The Lying Game and was seriously disappointed. 
 The Lying Game series has a great plot idea, but each individual book felt like it was floating without much of a plot on its own. I really think this series could easily have been half as long and still told the same story. Sutton the ghost is our narrator and she is incredibly annoying as the narrator. In each books she basically decides who the murder is and encourages Emma (silently of course) to go after them right up until the last chapter where we find out that person had an alibi the whole time - it was officially annoying after book 2 and was really irritating by book 6. 
 Unlike many other YA books, this series didn't pretend that the main protagonist (Emma pretended to be Sutton) was some uniquely intelligent individual with many special talents, she was just a normal girl. That is what made the series fun to read, she often made mistakes, she didn't know how to investigate and she often messed up - it added some realism to an otherwise crazy storyline. 
 Emma's romance with Ethan always bothered me, it felt like insta-love for a bit where they barely knew each other and then all of a sudden he was like "I love you", "let's move in together!" To say the least he bugged me. I wasn't terribly surprised to find out he was the killer - the first book where he instantly knows that Emma isn't Sutton was kind of a dead giveaway. Her parents literally could not tell them apart and some random guy who even admitted that he and Sutton weren't close could? Yeah, that was really believable - not. Nonetheless, I can understand how a scared Emma would cling onto him as the only confidant she had, I just wish that she had enough common sense to spy on him like Nisha did. 
 Overall, it wasn't quite up to par with the PLL series, but it was a really fun read. The two novellas that are part of the series do a decent job of giving the readers some insight into Sutton herself, but the author just couldn't make Sutton as sympathetic as she could with Courtney in the PLL series. Here, even though we learned a bit about Sutton's insecurities there was no sound basis for them and Sutton just continuously came off as a spoiled brat who occasionally had some good moments instead of a good person who occasionally had some bad moments. In the end though, we do get our HEA and alls well that ends well (except for all the dead people - their story doesn't end well but what can you expect in a Sara Shepard novel?).