The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
My rating: 3/5 cats
3.5 stars cats!
this is a very good mystery debut, with memorable characters and a fairly standard/familiar plot, but it’s got enough promise in it that i am very confident his second book will be remarkable.
joe talbert is a 21-year-old college student tasked with writing a biographical piece on an elderly individual for his writing class. having no family members fitting the bill, he goes to a nursing home to find a willing participant. the only resident with enough cognitive capacity to take part is carl iverson, a vietnam vet and convicted rapist/murderer released from jail on medical parole after thirty years; he is dying of pancreatic cancer and has been sent to the nursing home to live out his remaining months.
iverson agrees to be interviewed as long as joe agrees to complete transparency in all of their dealings.
I’ll be truthful with you. I’ll answer any question you put to me. I’ll be that proverbial open book, but I need to know that you are not wasting my limited time. You have to be honest with me as well.
knowing he is going to die soon, he feels an urgency to come clean about his past – all of his past.
So this…this conversation with you…this is my dying declaration. I don’t care if anybody reads what you write. I don’t even care if you write it down at all…I have to say the words out loud. I have to tell someone the truth about what happened all those years ago. I have to tell someone the truth about what I did.”
so joe finds himself becoming a sort of amateur sleuth, listening to what iverson is telling him, but also tracking down the primary sources of the long-ago crime to find out what really happened, along with a pretty, but guarded, neighbor named lila.
joe is also dealing with a heap of personal problems – his bipolar alcoholic mother has shacked up with a man who has been abusing joe’s 18-year-old autistic brother jeremy, and joe finds himself having to step in and care for jeremy and bail his mother out of jail while iverson’s life keeps ticking inexorably away.
the relationships between joe and carl and joe and jeremy are very realistically rendered, although the relationship between joe and lila is somewhat less so. jeremy is very sensitively depicted, and the backstory involving joe’s grandfather added a nice horrifying but then tender element.
there’s a little The Ploughmen: A Novel here, a little The Silence of the Lambs in the quid pro quo element, and the vietnam scenes are particularly strong. it doesn’t ultimately do much more than be a serviceable mystery novel with interesting characters, but it’s well worth a read, and stay tuned, because i predict his second book will have tightened up some of the formulaic bits and i am eagerly awaiting it.
this kind of annoyed me: View Spoiler »
but apart from that – a good book and an author to watch.
and the book also made a great eternal flame-stand at BEA!!
also, did you guys know that erin is as cute as a button??? it’s true.
