“Listen for the Lie” by Amy Tintera (Review)

Synopsis: Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all and, if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. But after Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer.

It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie and its too-good looking host, Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one who did it.

Reading Listen for the Lie was like going on a date with a hot multi-millionaire at a five-star restaurant only to watch in horror as they pour wine on the waiter’s head because they brought the wrong bottle to the table. It had everything to recommend itself in the first 40-50% of the book, only to snowball into an embarrassing CW show that had me cringing so hard I chipped a tooth.

The premise of Listen isn’t a unique one, but I admit I was initially wooed by the pacing and the main character. To the book’s credit, the quick tempo of the story remains consistent, which is the reason why I finished it in spite of my mounting desire to DNF. Lucy’s character, however, takes a sharp nosedive which she never recovers from.

Lucy goes from being a funny protagonist to a tedious nihilist with all the trappings of your run-of-the-mill Female Millennial Character: Rampant alcoholism, nymphomania, and an over reliance on sarcasm in leu of actual wit. I understand she is an incredibly damaged person, but the way she continuously self-sabotages makes it impossible for me to root for her. And is it strictly necessary that she shove her tongue down every single male’s throat? Just asking for a friend.

Unfortunately, Lucy isn’t the only crap character in this novel. Just about everyone in this town is a selfish, adulterous, nymphomaniac who exist solely to be red herrings for the mystery. I could excuse their obvious flaws if they were written in a way that was more three-dimensional, but they are hopelessly shallow in addition to being morally objectionable.

What’s worse is most of their egregious actions carry hardly any weight for Lucy. There are plenty of shocking revelations that emerge from the podcaster’s investigation that should rattle her, and yet they slide off like water from a duck’s back for the most part. How am I supposed to care about any of this if the main character is going to be so flippant about everything?

The only two characters I found bearable were the grandmother and the podcaster Ben, but even they had me banging my head against a wall during certain sections. The fact that Ben allows himself to become so compromised in this case (without delving into spoilers) in spite of the obvious risk is stupid and seemingly below his intelligence. As for the grandma, she is basically a hedonistic booze hound in her dotage and this is played for laughs in spite of the fact that this is incredibly alarming for someone her age and should belie a serious mental breakdown. The constant boozing as well as her obvious hatred of men is a serious cry for help.

Speaking of…

I know I will get in trouble for saying this like I did with my Invisible Girl review, but the author seems to have a massive stick up her backside when it comes to men. Every time a women is interviewed for the podcast they take potshot after potshot at males in general. Apart from this, there is only one good male character in this book and even he is portrayed as being an egotist. The rest of the men in this book are either stupid, violent, adulterous, or some combination of the three.

The women aren’t exactly pillars of virtue either, however, they are not subjected to the same amount of metatextual scrutiny their male counterparts are because, presumably, they are only bad because men made them that way.

While I had little hope that the conclusion of the novel would be worth the emotional tole these characters were taking on me, I soldiered on. Predictably, the murderer’s reveal turned out to be every bit as disappointing as you would think. I didn’t anticipate who the killer was, but that’s because the author essentially had to re-write the perpetrator’s personality in order to make this “twist” work.

The climax, if you can even call it that, was so ridiculous I kept imagining Looney Tunes sound effects playing in the background. If you know, you know.

Spoilers:

I don’t think a murder mystery has ever managed to make me hate the victim before, but Listen somehow accomplished this with Savvy. Savvy, as it turns out, was not the angelic, nice girl everyone remembers, but rather a sex-crazed, blood-thirsty lunatic who had killed before and was itching to kill again. The crazy part is I think we are meant to find her constant intrusions (Let’s kill…Let’s kill) into the narrative funny. They aren’t. Moreover they are confusing. Apart from being a misdirect to get the reader to think Lucy might be guilty after all, what was the point in giving Lucy constant homicidal ideation at the behest of Savvy? It feels lazy and unnecessary. As was the plot to kill Matt. It never felt like Lucy was ever truly serious about it either so the whole thing was just an artificial way of drumming up suspense for an event we knew wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Furthermore, this does nothing to persuade the audience that Savvy deserves justice. If anything it makes us grateful that a burgeoning Elizabeth Bathory was taken out before she wound up hacking her way through Plumpton. Sure, her first kill was self defense, but stabbing someone over twenty times isn’t a normal response regardless of the circumstances and proposing you kill someone else is even less so. If I were Lucy, I would be freaked the hell out and sever all contact with her as soon as humanly possible.

Regardless, once it is revealed Savvy is the infamous devil on Lucy’s shoulder, my interest in finding her killer nearly vanished entirely.

The reveal that the killer was Emmett, Lucy’s wimpy high school friend, was the biggest womp womp in murder-mystery history. I knew it couldn’t possibly be Lucy’s ex-husband Matt (or at least I hoped so) because it was too glaringly obvious. However, the revelation that it was Emmett all along was infinitely worse. Emmett wasn’t my favorite character (he’s too boring for that), but I took solace in his existence because he was one of the only male character that wasn’t unrepentantly stupid or abusive. But no. He was a murderous incel with impotent rage all along because…basically the plot needed him to be.

Seriously, he gets rejected by his high school crush and his first instinct.…is to murder her and her friend with a hammer.

Not important but…where did he even get a hammer? I don’t think the book ever says. He just somehow found a hammer at a wedding venue’s parking lot and decided to go postal.

Final Thoughts:

Once again, I find myself at odds with the general populace. The overall consensus for this novel appears to be that this is an “amazing whodunit” with “great characters” and “laugh out loud” humor. Personally, I can count all the times I laughed at this book on one hand.

If that hand had no fingers.

3/10