What I’m Reading: The Life We Bury

I just finished up listening to the audio book The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens.  I grabbed this one off Audible.  I was over checking out the deal of the day there and this book was up in my “recommended books” section.  It looked like it might be good so I got it.

One of my favorite things about this book is that it takes place near my “old stomping grounds”.  The family lives in Austin, Minnesota.  One of the people in the book attends Mankato State University.  They talk about the Mississippi River.  The characters have to travel down I-35 to go to Mason City, Iowa.  It is silly but it makes me feel like the book is even more real because I know these places.

Here’s what Amazon had to say, “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. 

Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl’s conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it’s too late to escape the fallout?”

Beyond my liking that I knew the place where the book takes place, I liked the premise of the book:  Make an investigation the right way.  I do have trouble that the code wasn’t broken in the first place and find that hard to believe but all in all the book was good.  It’s a debut novel so that sounds promising too….

Amazon readers say 4.4 stars.  I’ll go with it.  It was a good story…a little predictable but sometimes that’s not all bad.