Why isn’t this a podcast, you may wonder as you read this novel
Sex, lies and podcasts converge in Amy Tintera’s “Listen for the Lie,” an edgy mystery that artfully blends our growing obsession with the true-crime genre and our ongoing predilection for murder, mayhem and quirky detectives in fiction.
Tintera strategically plants some of the most popular tropes of the true-crime landscape into her search-for-a-killer tale: The murder takes place in the small town of Plumpton, Texas, where everybody has an opinion about who did it. The victim is Savannah “Savvy” Harper, a 24-year-old bartender who, like many women who meet her fate in the truecrime genre, is immortalized as an angelic former cheerleader who was adored by everyone. Her suspected killer, Lucy Chase, also 24 at the time of the murder, is remembered as the girl with a temper who once attacked a high school student. She and her wellto-do husband, Matt, whom she met at The University of Texas at Austin, were planning to open a restaurant in Plumpton.
After Savvy’s body is discovered, Lucy is found stumbling along a back road. She is covered in Savvy’s blood and suffering from a traumatic head injury. Lucy cannot recall what happened on that terrible night, but most of the people in town believe she is faking memory loss. Lucy has scratch marks on her arms, and her skin is found under Savvy’s fingernails, but the search for a murder weapon comes up empty and no one is paying attention to the fact that Lucy is seriously injured too.
Lucy moves to Los Angeles rather than live in a small town where everyone thinks she’s a killer. Also, Lucy has a big secret: In her head, she can’t stop murdering people. The voice of Savvy Harper, her dead best friend, goads Lucy into imagining increasingly violent murders — of her mom, her ex-husband, her ex-boyfriend, even strangers. She doesn’t follow through, but she hopes these morbid fantasies will help her mind kick loose what happened when Savvy was found bludgeoned to death in Texas Hill Country.
Lucy finds she can’t escape her past. It’s five years later and Ben Owens, moderator for the true crime podcast “Listen for the Lie,” decides to investigate Savvy’s death. As Lucy puts it, “It’s probably unfair to say that a podcast ruined my life … But a podcaster dragging the case into the public eye, five years later, doesn’t exactly improve my life.” Still, Lucy also wants answers, so she travels back to Plumpton to lend Ben a hand. She’s a podcaster’s dream sidekick, and her involvement in the investigation adds fuel to the novel — and the podcast.
Lucy’s pretty sure her parents and now-ex-husband Matt — they split up after the murder — believe she’s guilty. One more reason this crime (and this novel) is begging for a podcast. Savvy’s sister speaks for everyone when she’s interviewed for the show: “She got away with murder, and everyone knows it. Every single person in Plumpton knows Lucy Chase killed my sister. It’s just that no one can prove it.” Tintera nails the short-on-facts commentary that infects so many podcasts.
As Ben and Lucy play sleuths, alibis fall apart and new evidence and possible killers come under suspicion, some — male suspects specifically — who the police didn’t deem significant enough to investigate. Tintera, the author of several books for young adults, slowly reveals her characters’ true personalities, which in some cases means a penchant for violence or misogyny. In many ways, “Listen for the Lie” is that age-old story in which the testimony and opinions of men are given more credence than those of women, especially when what women say doesn’t fit the narrative that men want to lock into place.
Through her deep understanding of this impediment to justice, Tintera succeeds as a writer of gritty fiction, using the true-crime genre as her muse. She imagines a podcast-worthy criminal investigation that would draw an admirably sized fan base if “Listen for the Lie” was an actual podcast.