Tell Me Lies by J.P. Pomare
This moderately adequate psychological thriller has had me questioning whether or not Audible is capable of putting out good content. Well performed content, yes, but even the producing bells and whistles got in the way of the story. It’s clever that when the narrator is talking to someone else on the phone, it sounds slightly muffled and tinny, but it’s also annoying because it’s hard to hear.
This should have been a good story. If you listened to it and enjoyed it, please stop reading this review because I don’t want to make you feel bad for enjoying the audiobook equivalent of a Disney blockbuster. It’s not too long, well performed, and adheres to a classic formula. Seemingly successful and happy professional has a terrible thing happen and starts to suspect one of her clients. As events escalate, she struggles to get the police to take her seriously. Just when she thinks she’s finally got the bad guy safely locked away, she learns she was wrong about who the bad guy was and her role in his motives. There’s a tense scene where she barely escapes and her family is threatened, and then we see the scene from the beginning where she pushes the guy into the train, and then we find out her shocking back story. It’s a classic for a reason. Should have been a winner.
Here were my issues with this. Problem #1. Don’t use the DSM-V as a monster manual. Okay? We all have problems. Some of us are anxious. Some of us aren’t anxious enough. Anyone can be antisocial if they’re hungry or tired. Fun fact, did you know you can have Aspergers and not be an asshole? You can be a narcissist and not a serial killer. You can even be a sociopath and not a serial killer (just a politician or something). But the main character, who is supposedly a clinical psychologist, talks smugly about her patients with this sophomoric contempt as if their problems make them WEIRD and CRAZY when they’re just normal people trying to get some help with mental illness. And also, the main character seems to talk down to the reader, throwing around these terms like “oh, well, she has borderline personality disorder and maybe a little anxiety thrown in, such a hard case” as if the listener is going to be awed by this professional speak, when really these are terms that everyone knows and she’s describing a woman who feels quite normal and familiar. People usually become psychoanalysts because they care deeply and want to help people, not because they want to impress others. She came across as smug and arrogant and devoid of empathy.
Even before she started seeing her patient on the side she didn’t sound very professional. She sounded a little like a brittle woman who was very easily upset. She doesn’t confide in her husband, and in fact lies to him, she tries desperately to control her children in a way that just pushes them farther away, and in general just acts like that asshole dude we all know who is convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room because he once took an IQ test and he got a hundred, which he thinks is a perfect score. She acted like a dude, and not just a guy, but a dumb guy who is so very impressed with himself that he doesn’t need to ask for help from the people in his life he supposedly trusts.
I almost rooted for the bad guy to kill her, except he’s a whiny little bitch who blames everyone else for his problems. He’s at least smarter than her, which wasn’t hard. Him: You know everything I’ve said to you is a lie, but believe me now when I say I’ll kill your daughter unless you come with me to an abandoned building and let me duct tape your wrists together. Her: Okay, but if I do that, you’ll let her go, right? Him: Yeah, totally. Her: seems legit.
I feel like what I want from a story is a combination of plot, character and setting/description. Some books have a setting/description so lush that it doesn’t matter if the plot is trite, because that’s not what you’re there for (cozy mystery, eg.) Some books have characters so compelling that you don’t care that nothing happens. But for a thriller plot to work, it has to be surprising and/or it has to happen to characters I care about. I sort of kind of cared about July, except she was such a caricature of a whiny teenage girl. And her son was just kind of a caricature of a preteen boy. There’s a scene where he’s up late at night and she goes in to check on him and he’s just crying because he saw a photo of his mom kissing someone. I was like, seriously? He’s doing that for an hour? Crying for an hour because he saw his mom kissing someone? They boy whose chat group routinely threaten to rape each other and this is what upsets him? Yeah, no. Implausible.
Even July in danger was a tenuous thread, because she didn’t seem like a real person. The husband is also kind of an NPC who doesn’t seem to have motivations of his own. Even before we were told the protagonist’s deep, dark secret, she wasn’t someone I empathized with because of the way she strung an innocent man up on the flimsiest of evidence, (when we all knew immediately she was wrong, because it’s so obvious) or the way she hid secrets that put her in a bad light even when revealing them would help. You want me to like the main character? Don’t have her lie to her husband when he’s a nice guy who made her dinner.
I liked that they started with her pushing a man in front of a train and end with her pushing the guy in front of the train and fill the middle with the reasons she did it. I think that killing him was her only redeeming action, frankly, because the rest of the time she just seemed to be muddling through. I can get behind evil characters as long as they are skilled in their malevolence. Maybe that’s what put me off so much. She just seemed so damned incompetent. That a psychotherapist should care so little about other people was implausible enough, but even with that handicap she seemed unusually ineffective at everything she touched. Middling stupid and middling evil with a cardboard family and a bad guy who was even less likeable than her, despite the narrator’s charming accents. All the production values in the world can’t save a tepid story. This is not the kind of thriller that keeps me up at night.
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