The Life We Bury (Joe Talbert, #1; Detective Max Rupert, #1)
Allen Eskens
1 ratings • 1 reviews
The Life We Bury (Joe Talbert, #1; Detective Max Rupert, #1)
Allen Eskens
1 ratings • 1 reviews
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder. As Joe writes about Carl's life, especially Carl's valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory. Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl’s conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it’s too late to escape the fallout?
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Listened to the audio book, this was a book club pick.
I thought this was a somewhat standard mystery/crime/action book. I'm not sure if I'd picked it up randomly that I would have finished, but I was determined to because it was a book club book, and because it was fast paced.
The first half is Joe being a dumb 20 year old kid, despite his abusive childhood and family problems and responsibilities. This half of the book is a lot of set up about Joe and why we should have sympathy for him and about Carl, who we should also have sympathy for and be curious about. I was ambivalent about Carl and Joe, other than thinking Joe was dumb.
Then the second half of the book turns into an action intense cat and mouse game of survival. Joe seemed to be still making terrible decisions but managing to survive impossibly well/luckily.
The end ties up in multiple perfect plot bows, too Hallmark convenient for my tastes.
Every character felt like a stock character to me, minimal development, there for plot devices. It sort of felt like the author maybe had this idea of a crime and developed that into a thought exploration about who was convicted and his life and the "real who done it" and that sort of forced this book to have its own plot to convey that thought experiment.
Meh.
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