BUZZ BOOK: A crime seen through a new lens

Devoted “This American Life” listeners will recognize the story: Marie, an 18-year old in Lynnwood, Wash., claimed that a stranger broke into her house, tied her up with shoelaces, took pictures and raped her.

Cops doubted the story. A complete stranger? Shoelaces? Marie didn’t help convince them. She didn’t cry, seemed to dodge questions and wasn’t deemed a reliable narrator given her rocky childhood in 20 foster homes, where she also claimed to be a victim of molestation. Her foster mother even doubted her story, dismissing the rape as “attention seeking.” Cops interrogated, got her to confess to making the whole thing up and charged her with falsifying a criminal report. It seemed open and shut.

Flash forward two years later. Colorado police noticed a string of rapes that followed the same modus operandi: a complete stranger breaks into a home, binds the victim, takes pictures and rapes her. When police arrest the suspected serial rapist, they discover a cache of pictures. In one, there’s a picture of a young woman named Marie posed next her to her learner’s permit. She hadn’t made up a thing. If this were fiction, you’d roll your eyes. But this is a true story, originally written up by ProPublica reporters T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong in their Pulitzer Prize winning 2016 article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.” The reporters spent two years expanding the article into “A False Report” (Crown) — and the results are compelling, no matter how familiar you are with Marie’s story. The book felt like a revelation — taut, nuanced and expertly reported.

“A False Report” shows us that often rape victims don’t act the way we think they should act, a particularly relevant takeaway in the #MeToo era. As the authors write: “After Marie was raped, people expected her to be hysterical or broken. Marie didn’t want to let go of normal, even if that meant pretending. Normal is what she craved before. It’s what she craved after.”