If I had read Amy Tinera’s Listen for the Lie instead of listening to it as an audiobook I’m not sure I’d have liked it so much. As it was, the audio version had the podcast-within-the-novel fully narrated with ridiculous podcast theme music and I got utterly absorbed in a novel that was a true-crime podcast that was also a mystery novel. Like look forward to my commute kind of fun.
Oh don’t get me wrong. The book is ridiculous. Lots of clenched jaws and amnesia and cellphones going missing at just the right moment to make the plot plausible and men rescuing women who don’t need rescuing but like it all the same. Very, very silly.
And if you can put aside (as all true crime podcasts ask you to do) that there’s a murder motivating the romp through investigations and red herrings and sordid backstories and *gasp* revelations then you can just have a great little read.
In sum: middling to poor writing, barely any complexity to characters, and an all out absorbing plot especially so when in audio. Cue it up for your next long car trip and you won’t be sorry.
Literary Vice 