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, Tex., 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 true-crime 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 well-to-do husband, Matt, whom she met at the University of Texas at Austin, were planning to open a restaurant in Plumpton.
