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. Aided by his skeptical neighbor, Lila, Joe throws himself into uncovering the truth. Thread by thread, he begins to unravel 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?
Tense, engrossing and fast-paced reading–an excellent debut novel Minnesota writer Allen Eskens’ first novel is tense, engrossing and fast-paced reading–an excellent debut.Â
Fantastic debut mystery! It’s not particularly often that my wife reads and enjoys any of the books that cross my path. Whilst I endeavour to read what she reads (eventually) she doesn’t feel the same need to reciprocate, nor should she. Our last shared and loved book in common was Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins last year, until Eskens debut The Life We Bury fell into her hands after mine.Â
character interaction and psychological aspects that make this a great story and read The back-jacket summary drew me in and proved (unlike so many novels) to be an honest pitch: A story about a student writer who, somewhat by chance, locates the subject of his biographical (college class) project at a nearby nursing home. The biographical subject, a Vietnam War vet who was convicted of rape and murder 30 years earlier, is dying of cancer thereby introducing an added, looming deadline to finish the writing project. The writer begins with the weary task of documenting the life…