Book #103 |
Book: The Life We Bury | Author: Allen Eskens | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Audiobook |
Pages: 306 | Duration: 11/03/25 – 11/03/25 (1 day) | |
| Rating: ★★★★★ | Genres: fiction, mystery, thriller, crime, suspense | ||
| 📕10-word summary: A wrongly convicted, terminally ill man makes a dying declaration. 🖌6-word review: Fast-paced, confounding crime mystery unravels compellingly. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka — a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy — and you get a picture of the mother I left behind.” | |||
| 🎓A new-to-me word: vacuous | |||
| Description:* 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.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: I loved this book, because it was one of those stories where you can’t figure out how something that seems so “black and white” or “open and shut” could have happened any other way. But then, like Paul Harvey’s radio program of yesteryear, The Rest of the Story, another perspective reveals how it did. I also liked how the climax didn’t happen until pretty much the very last page. I might very well make this a Mostly Social Book Club book in the future. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
