Listen for the Lie

YA author Tintera (The Q) makes her adult debut with the outstanding story of a young woman haunted by rumors that she killed her best friend. Five years ago, 20-something golden girl Savannah Harper was brutally murdered in her hometown of Plumpton, Tex. The same day, Savannah’s best friend, Lucy Chase, was discovered amnesia-stricken on the side of the road with her dress covered in Savannah’s blood. While Lucy was never charged with the murder, most of Plumpton has long assumed she’s guilty—and given the gap in her memory, Lucy has questions of her own. Now living in L.A., she’s fired from her investment job when the new season of hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie renews public interest in Savannah’s case. Humiliated, Lucy accepts an invitation from her grandmother, Beverly, to return to Plumpton for a visit. When Lucy arrives in town, she finds Ben Owens, the charismatic host of Listen for the Lie, already poking around, and attempts to stay one step ahead of him as she pieces together the events of that fateful night. Tintera alternates transcripts of the podcast with chapters from Lucy’s perspective, getting a lot of mileage from her protagonist’s dry wit (“A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I’m buying a chicken,” goes the book’s first sentence) and some devilish plot twists. Readers will be hard-pressed not to wolf down this intelligent page-turner in a single sitting. (Mar.)