Booked & Printed

by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

The history of a relationship—an intense friendship or a romance—can be mysterious to outsiders. There is the performance of a pair’s togetherness in public, often with displays of kindness and compatibility. And then there are the scenarios that arise in private, when calculated choices, unexpected demands, and reactivity can curdle. Eventually the realities of the public and the private may collide, bringing a bond’s secrets into the open. But a long relationship can be mysterious even to those who live in it, remember it, and, occasionally, return to it. This month, Booked and Printed examines women protagonists coming to terms with their past relationships, even as new and present murderous danger rises around them.

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In her adult novel debut, Listen for the Lie, Amy Tintera introduces us to Lucy, a young woman who has constant visions of killing people close to her. Her boyfriend, her employer, her parents: No one is safe from the fantasies of violence her mind generates. Any object within her reach is a potential murder weapon, a lamp indistinguishable in its murderous utility from a knife. And why not fantasize? She has been living under the burden of suspicion for half a decade. On a fateful night in her Texas hometown, onlookers found Lucy walking on the side of the road, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood. Lucy has no memory of the hours before Savvy’s murder, and though police released her for lack of evidence, the entire town has indicted her in their minds. Her husband, Matt, the town’s beloved sweetheart, divorced her. Her own parents suspect her. Often, Lucy suspects herself.

Lucy has fled to Los Angeles in the intervening years, but her grandmother, and an unwelcome development, draw her back to Texas. A wildly popular American true crime podcast, the titular Listen for the Lie, has decided to take on the circumstances around Savvy’s murder.

The chief pleasure of Listen for the Lie is the narrator’s voice. Lucy has suffered under a level of suspicion, family dysfunction, community rejection, and self-doubt few could likely bear. Yet with her arresting first-person perspective, Lucy carries an infectious spirit of defiance. She has a wicked sense of humor, a free-flowing capacity for pleasure, and a sharp sense of observation, especially of the men who enter her orbit. She is a welcome character to follow, particularly as her own vulnerabilities and discoveries deepen. Her sense of agency is compelling, even while the reality of her suffering, and the truth of her relationships, lend the plot and portrayals true gravity.

The inclusion of a podcast storyline is currently common in contemporary mystery fiction. The device risks becoming as oversaturated as the proliferation of true crime podcasts online. But the podcast transcripts in Listen for the Lie lend dynamism to the plot. Each voice the host interviews gives rise to a larger sense of the oppressive, gossipy, opinionated small town in Texas. Each character from Lucy’s past is distinct and unique, revealing more and more of that fateful night of Savvy’s murder and moving toward a truth Lucy wonders if she’ll ever acquire.

Listen for the Lie is difficult to turn away from. It unfolds with intensifying surprises. As Lucy revisits each relationship in her life—with her parents, her ex-husband, her long-lost crush, her former friends—the plot shifts and twists, keeping readers continuously and deliciously guessing. Lucy is a protagonist full of disturbing ideas, questionable choices, and deep emotions. Her true grief for her murdered best friend, Savvy, is an anchoring revelation. Lucy’s company as a character stays captivating, especially as she travels closer to a truth she, and readers, will not expect.

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In I Need You to Read This by Jessa Maxwell, a young woman, Alex Marks, leads a lonely, struggling existence as a copywriter in New York City. Her only friends are acquaintances: a retired police officer and waitress that she sees at a diner. She mostly works from home, away from colleagues. That is, until unfortunate circumstances lead her to a prestigious new gig.

A beloved, well-known advice columnist at the prominent New York Herald has been murdered. The suspect has yet to be found, but the vacancy at Dear Constance needs filling. Alex has a deep and abiding respect for the column, and so she answers a sample letter as part of the application. To her surprise, the chief editor hires her out of hundreds of candidates. It’s a dream job in a legendary institution. But as Alex meets the idiosyncratic staff members at the paper, and as she sorts through the pile of supplications and anxieties in the form of Dear Constance’s letters, evidence of something deeply awry soon emerges. Some of it emerges from Alex’s own secret past. A new man soon enters her life, his ambiguous presence forcing Alex to confront a bygone era she has fled.

The conceit of an advice columnist’s mysterious death is a promising one, and the Dear Constance letters provide an intriguing series of breaks within the plot. The novel is interspersed with a series of missives from one particular writer to Dear Constance. She has moved in with her boyfriend, and over months, she describes her developing relationship with rising emotion, hoping Dear Constance can help her find the clarity she needs to make a pivotal decision.

Elsewhere, the characterization of each individual in I Need You to Read This feels as if it could have provided readers more. The personalities—from harried assistants to villains revealed—largely seem sketched from unsurprising expectations of who might fill those roles. Plot wise, experienced thriller readers will likely spot an antagonist early on.

But the storyline of I Need You to Read This clips clearly along, providing readers with an easy and entertaining read. Sometimes it can be comforting to immerse in a mystery straightforwardly solved, much like paging through a long, questioning letter whose answer comes simply and satisfyingly.