I don’t have a sophisticated grading system for novels, like five stars or three thumbs (or noses) up. I should probably develop one. I generally just group them loosely into three categories: “I hated it and didn’t finish it,” “I liked it enough to finish it, but probably won’t look for another book by the same author,” and “I loved it.”

All Lies sits solidly in the middle category. I was interested enough to finish it, but I wasn’t much impressed with the writing. Author Cunningham has good instincts, I think, but he needs to work on his craftsmanship.

The story is told by the main character, Del Hunnicutt. Del’s first words quote his father’s dying declaration: “I come from a long line of idiots…”

Through the course of the story, Del learns things he never knew about his grandfather, who was idiot enough to get involved in an art heist, and then died in a bomber during World War II. He goes out on a date arranged through a computer matching service, and his match turns out to be a descendent of one of his grandfather’s criminal associates. She manipulated their meeting in order to find out what he knew about the “treasure” the gang was supposed to have left behind, a treasure Del has never heard of.

The next day his date is murdered, but he is soon approached by the woman’s sister, Sabrina, a much more appealing and (seemingly) trustworthy person. Together they set out to get ahold of a lost painting, said to contain the secret to finding the treasure. It turns out they’re not the only people looking for that painting, and things get messy.

As I said, the story was interesting enough to keep me reading, though I thought the writing unpolished. The characters’ actions don’t always seem logical in terms of their personalities. And sometimes the prose was very amateurish: “It was going to be a while before we would be able to accurately describe the uniqueness of what we had just experienced.” Nor did the logic of the story always work, as when we’re told that criminals couldn’t sell certain precious objects they had stolen because nobody had any money in the Great Depression.

But I did finish the book, which is better than a lot of self-published novels do with me. So I give it a moderate recommendation. There weren’t any overly objectionable adult themes.