Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder
A Novel
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Lenny Marks is excellent at not having a life.
She bikes home from work at exactly 4pm each day, buys the same groceries for the same meals every week, and owns thirty-six copies of The Hobbit (currently arranged by height). The closest thing she has to a friendship is playing Scrabble against an imaginary Monica Gellar while watching Friends reruns.
And Lenny Marks is very, very good at not remembering what happened the day her mother and stepfather disappeared when she was still a child. The day a voice in the back of her mind started whispering, You did this.
Until a letter from the parole board arrives in the mail--and when her desperate attempts to ignore it fail, Lenny starts to unravel. As long-buried memories come to the surface, Lenny’s careful routines fall apart. For the first time, she finds herself forced to connect with the community around her, and unexpected new relationships begin to bloom. Lenny Marks may finally get a life–but what if her past catches up to her first?
Equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kerryn Mayne’s stunning debut is an irresistible novel about truth, secrets, vengeance, and family lost and found, with a heroine who's simply unforgettable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mayne debuts with the underwhelming story of an awkward middle school teacher in Australia whose repressed childhood memories come roaring to the surface. Lenny Marks, 37, generally sticks to herself, though she bonds with her grocer Ned and her elderly neighbor Maureen. One day, Lenny drops in for a visit and finds Maureen unconscious on the floor. The sight triggers flashes of a traumatic childhood event, and Lenny begins to piece together that the scar on her thigh came from her alcoholic stepfather Fergus. The complete details of the incident come out later, after calls from a prison parole board reveal Fergus is incarcerated and that he victimized Lenny, which adds a sense of foreboding and sets the stage for a climactic showdown. Mayne convinces in her depiction of Lenny's anxious inner life, though a romantic subplot is devoid of chemistry, and a couple left-field twists contort the story rather than enhance it. This doesn't quite come together.
