Christina Baker Kline and Anne Burt are the authors of the new novel Please Don't Lie. Kline's other books include Orphan Train, and Burt's other books include The Dig.
Q: How did the two of you decide to collaborate on this new novel, and what was your writing process like?
A: We have been friends for 25 years, ever since Anne – newly relocated from New York City – attended an event for Christina’s second novel at a bookstore in Montclair, New Jersey. We quickly discovered a shared sensibility around books, movies, TV, and culture – and almost as quickly realized we were both pregnant: Christina with her third child, Anne with her first.
Our creative partnership has evolved over the years, from co-editing a book of essays to developing a pitch for a potential television series to co-authoring Please Don’t Lie, the first in a series of psychological thrillers set in the fictional Adirondack Mountain town of Crystal River, New York.
This novel marks an exciting new direction for both of us. Christina, whose nine novels include the New York Times bestsellers Orphan Train, The Exiles, and A Piece of the World, is known for crafting unforgettable characters and richly textured narratives. Anne’s debut novel The Dig earned acclaim for its psychological depth and haunting atmosphere.
With Please Don’t Lie, we've blended our strengths to create a thriller that combines immersive settings, deep characterization, and page-turning plot twists — a story that, we hope, lingers in readers' minds long after the final page.
Our writing process is totally collaborative. Our voice has become something wholly unique, distinct from our individual fiction styles and shaped by our shared fascination with human nature, secrets, and suspense.
Our shared voice, it turns out, is sharper and more propulsive than in our separate books, and unafraid to twist the knife.
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 – in either location, we read aloud, revise, and hash things out across the table. And when we can’t be in the same place at the same time, tools like shared digital notes and Google docs allow us to write together and have become essential to our work.
We also spent a week together in a remote Airbnb in upstate New York, immersing ourselves in the eerie, isolated vibe as we hammered out the plot of Please Don’t Lie. Surrounded by quiet woods and winding mountain roads, we were able to easily invent the fictional town of Crystal River.
Q: What inspired the plot of Please Don’t Lie, and how did you create your character Hayley?
A: What excited us most about writing Please Don’t Lie was the opportunity to explore questions together that have fascinated us for years. How well do we really know the people closest to us? What lengths will we go to protect our secrets? And how do the stories we tell ourselves about the past shape the choices we make in the present?
Working together has been as revelatory as the writing itself. Characters surprised us. Plot twists emerged mid-conversation, unplanned and thrilling. We pushed each other to dig deeper into the psychological complexity of each character while maintaining the relentless pace that keeps readers turning pages.
It was out of this process that Hayley emerged. We began knowing a few things about her: she’d suffered the tragic loss of her parents and sister two years before the start of Please Don’t Lie.
When our story begins, she is newly married and very much in love. She is also forging into unknown territory, both emotional and physical, by agreeing to leave New York City, which she loves, and move to her new husband’s remote childhood home upstate.
Hayley was running from the secrets and lies of her past, and we knew they would come back to haunt her. What we learned over the course of writing the novel was how much stronger, savvier, and more resilient Hayley was than we first imagined. She kept talking back to us as we built her story, insisting on her own agency. We listened, and learned.
An early key to Hayley’s character emerged when we began creating the self-help authors she follows. As Hayley navigates her roles as sister, friend, and wife, she confronts her regrets – both about what she’s done and what she’s failed to do – by turning to a wide range of writers for guidance.
In developing this facet of her character, we realized that Please Don’t Lie was also becoming a deeper exploration of the self-help industry and its outsized influence on women’s lives. The “guide books,” as Hayley comes to call them, add nuance and tension to her search for clarity and control.
For better and sometimes for worse, self-help gurus wield enormous cultural power – and through Hayley, we found ourselves reckoning with both the comfort they offer and the unintended consequences of their advice.
Q: The writer Megan Abbott called the novel “[p]sychologically rich and bone chilling.” What do you think of that description?
A: When we received Megan Abbott’s blurb, we immediately called each other in utter delight and excitement. She understood exactly what we were aiming for in Please Don’t Lie.
Abbott’s psychological thrillers are masterclasses in psychological tension: atmospheric, emotionally layered, and rooted in the complex interior lives of women. Her work explores power dynamics with a slow, simmering intensity, where danger emerges not from strangers, but from within relationships – between friends, sisters, mothers, and daughters. Every glance, every line of dialogue carries weight.
That kind of slow-burn suspense is what we wanted to achieve in Please Don't Lie, so to have one of our literary North Stars describe it as “psychologically rich and bone chilling” felt not just thrilling, but deeply affirming.
Q: As you noted, the novel is set in a remote part of the Adirondacks--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: In our writing, setting is never just a backdrop, but a shaping force that influences tone, character, and plot. The Adirondacks, a place familiar to us both, serves as both character and catalyst in Please Don’t Lie.
The Adirondacks are ideally suited to psychological suspense because they embody contradiction: intimate yet isolating, serene yet threatening, breathtakingly beautiful yet genuinely dangerous.
With its vastness, sudden weather shifts, and true wilderness, the region naturally raises the stakes. Any hiker knows you can be just one wrong turn from real peril – and we wanted to channel that unpredictability into the emotional atmosphere of our novel.
The haunting contrast between sublime beauty and the ever-present possibility of being lost creates exactly the kind of tension we needed for a story about trust, betrayal, and survival.
Small mountain communities also offer unique psychological dynamics. Everyone knows everyone, secrets are harder to keep, and isolation can either bind people together or drive them apart.
Our fictional town of Crystal River sits just far enough from the beaten path to feel both familiar and uncanny – the kind of place where everyone knows each other until it turns out they don’t. That’s the perfect recipe for psychological suspense.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: 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 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.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: We wrote Please Don’t Lie first and foremost for ourselves, to explore ideas that fascinated (and haunted) us, and to see if we could pull off a twisty, layered story that kept us guessing.
But releasing it into the world has been a thrill of its own. Hearing from early readers has made the experience even more meaningful. We’re so grateful for the chance to do this Q&A. Thank you, Deborah!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here are previous Q&As with Christina Baker Kline and Anne Burt.
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