Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.
Listen, when it does the thing it does thing, so I had to round up to five stars because it’s so rare that I truly love a thriller. So many of them sound exactly the same, and have the exact same premise, and don’t really do much interesting beyond trying to shock the hell out of you (which I find uninteresting as the basis for a book). This is not a book that will blow your mind, but it is a book that knows exactly what it wants to do, does it, and does it with style. I can’t find a single fault with this book, and even better than that, I had a really great time with it. I will read it again! I regret not getting it in my Book of the Month box this month, but we shall be fixing that error shortly!
Anyway, I don’t want to hype this up too much, and a lot of it could just be my personal tastes, but a well-written thriller with a voice is so hard to find! I also loved the plot.
Our main character is Lucy Chase, who was found wandering a road the night after a wedding with a traumatic brain injury that resulted in memory loss, covered in blood. Her best friend Savvy is found dead near the same time, also with a wound to the head. When no other leads can be found, the town turns on Lucy, overwhelmingly believing she killed her best friend. So she leaves town and doesn’t look back. The worst part of this being, of course, that she doesn’t remember what happened so a part of her believes she might have killed Savvy, too. Fast forward five years and we have the first sentence of the book, which made me laugh out loud (as did the whole first page).
“A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I’m buying a chicken.”
Said podcaster is Ben Owens, host of “Listen for the Lie,” which has taken on Savvy’s case, and because the podcast is one lots of people listen to, Lucy can no longer go about her life in L.A. as if she wasn’t a murder suspect. She gets fired, her boyfriend awkwardly dumps her (despite the chicken, which, she is hilariously cooking him the Marry Me Chicken). So she goes home for her grandma’s 80th birthday, because where else is she going to go, and of course where is said podcaster? In Plumpton, TX. Her hometown.
Anyway, none of that conveys the tone of the book, which was funny and sad and full of characters that felt real to me. I loved Lucy’s grandma. I loved Lucy! (lol) She’s so sarcastic and darkly funny all the time, and watching her story unravel was a pleasure.
The book alternates between chapters from Lucy and transcripts (or in my case bc I did the audio, audio excerpts) from the podcast, and it was maybe the most well-done podcast I’ve seen in a book, because we actually got a substantial amount of content from it for once. Podcasts in books are often very truncated and can seem artificial, and this one didn’t. (Although, audiobook producers still haven’t gotten the hang of making fake podcasts SOUND good.)
Anyway, the ending made me tear up, and I didn’t guess whodunnit (bc this is also a mystery), and I just think very fondly of my experience with it over the past couple of days. This did not read like a debut. I wish it had a better cover. I hope lots of people pick it up and have an equally fun time. Will *definitely* be reading from this author again.
[4.5 stars]