Customer Reviews

Liars Anonymous

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been a Louise Ure fan from her first book Forcing Amaryllis and was equally as spellbound with The Fault Tree.

I bought Liars Anonymous for a cozy weekend read and I must say I couldn't put the book down. It was much, much darker than Ure's prior novels and left me chilled at times. It has twists and turns that you don't anticipate and like any great mystery writer, Ure had prepared you for the discovery with subtle and what appears to be effortless writing.

This is by far Ms. Ure's best book to date. The dialogue between characters is excellent and you can feel the Arizona and Mexico heat. The descriptive landscape carries us along as a character all onto its own without overshadowing the villians, victims and hero(s).

I was surprised by the darkness of the female protagonist, Jessie. In comparison to her first two novels, this shows Ure's expanding reach and depth as a writer.

Congratulations, Ms. Ure - it's a fantastic read.

I'm writing this review, not for those who will obviously enjoy it, but for those who will not. This is a heads-up for those of you who want a little emotion in your novels, who want a little logic in your heroines, who want some intelligence in the plotting, and who want a likeable main character.

Jessie is a board. A board who pumps iron and gets tattooed with a nail. A board who is neither very smart nor intuitive and who has a decidedly nasty streak in her from long years of emotional abuse at the hands of her adoptive mother. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but normally that sort of description fits the heroine's best friend, a minor character or even the villain. It still comes down to the fact that in order to have a good read you have to care about the hero. In order to care about the hero, you have to like him or her.

The book is short on characterizations and allowing the plot to hang together, scene to scene. Normal timelines of action are skipped and there are holes in the reasoning you could drive a tank through. The heroine is a tough lady and that's fine, but she's also used as a punching bag by Author Louise Ure. Frankly, I've never understood the need for writers, especially female writers, to mess up their heroines. You know, let them get kicked, raped, knifed, punched, shot, bloodied 20 ways from Sunday. Perhaps some female writers think they won't be accepted unless their female protagonists are just as macho and hardened as their male counterparts (Elvis Cole comes to mind), but that ain't a bit true except for a few creeps out there. For most of us, we want our women protagonists tough, tender, safe, in danger, dangerous, but mostly unharmed, outsmarting the crook rather than filleting him with a serrated switchblade. So if you don't want to see your main female character go all tough guy/masochist/sadist, don't read this book.

Another heads up: Ure is not afraid to be nasty with her characters in ways that are sometimes too terrible to contemplate. She cannot be trusted to slide around the horror shows with a gesture or reference. She will put your face right into it. But, hey, if that's your crap of tea, go for it. Not mine.

In Phoenix, Arizona, HandsOn Emergency roadside emergency service operator Jessie Dancing receives a frantic call from developer Darren Markson, whose car was rear-ended in the Tucson area, but the background noise led her to believe someone is killing him. She calls the police, but breaks company regulations by also following up on her own time by visiting his wife Emily who insists he is alive and well to her shock.

Jessie lived in Tucson until three years ago when she was arrested for the murder of cruel Walter Racine, who had abused his niece, her friend Catherine Chandliss, and apparently targeted his grand niece Katie. Jessie was not convicted in court and moved away. However, when teenager Felicia Villalobos, whom she meets at the site of the Markson accident and is a witness to the incident, dies in a car explosion, PPD Detective Len Sabin and Tucson DA Ted Dresden salivate as they have a second chance at the Queen of Liars Anonymous who they feel got away with one homicide.

Jessie makes this a vigorous unique thriller as the police and the DA plan to throw the book at her, not so much for the current homicide, but because they strongly feel she got away with murder a few years ago. Though Jessie has issues and somewhat wilts under the pressure, she also gets stronger and feistier. As the violence surges, with a great final spin Louise Ure provides an excellent tale of a woman in trouble from both sides of the law.

Harriet Klausner

I loved almost everything about this book. The Southwestern setting is vivid, the protagonist is appealingly flawed, and the supporting characters are well drawn. The plot is twisty, surprising, and satisfying. The writing is good and there are some strong images, such as the Day of the Dead details and some of the borderland ephemera. I would quibble with a few plot points, but not so much that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the narrative. Louise Ure is an author to recommend to others and to seek out yourself. I think she is very brave to make some of the risks she does.

Jessie Dancing works for a fictional OnStar-like service which responds to subscribers auto emergencies. She receives a call from one of her customers that is disturbing; the dialogue and noises she hears leads Jessie to believe that she an audible witness to the murder of the customer. When she reports the call to the police, the past she has been trying to hide is exposed - Jessie was tried and found not guilty of murder. However, Jessie was guilty, despite the fact that she was exonerated.

The emergency caller has links to the Arizona home town where Jessie was previously tried, and she still has enemies who are eager to prove that she was somehow involved in this new crime as well. As Jessie works to unravel the mystery of what happened during that phone call, she must also face the consequences of her past actions.

Liars Anonymous is difficult to put down because of its even pacing and appealing heroine. Though Jessie is flawed and stubborn to a fault, the reader cannot help but root for her as the underdog.

I wish I'd saved this book for a long trip where I needed distraction. Liars Anonymous is one of the best written mysteries I've read in a while. Ure does a masterful job of pacing and maintaining suspense. The two-level plot is complex and it's hard to write a review without spoilers. I recommend reading as little as possible about Liars Anonymous before diving in.

The book did start to get a little tedious about half way through, and I found myself skimming through some of the encounters with gang members. But I went back and read enough to figure out what happened. Wow.

What I liked:

--Taut, fast-paced writing of the heroine.
--Learning about the roadside service where the heroine works.
Intriguing character development: the heroine grows more complex with every page.
--Layers of plot: the back story unfolds along with the main story and both strands come together at the end. Reviewers who give away the back story are doing you a disservice.
--Ending that provokes thought: Did the heroine do the right thing? I'm not sure.
--Setting comes to life: I spent quite a bit of time in Tucson when I lived in New Mexico. I recognized most of the locations and wish I could have joined the heroine at the Blue Willow restaurant.
--Truly an original. I didn't find myself saying, "Reminds me of..." Closest was Kim Rozencraft's Rush.

Negatives:
--Several characters, including the cops, are not well-developed.
--The Legal Aid Lawyer seems implausible: I'm not sure a real one could or would do what this one did. There's one moment when the lawyer refers to opposing another criminal lawyer in court, but that's not likely: as far as I know, criminal lawyers face the DA.

First Line: I got away with murder once, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen again.

Roadside assistance operator Jessie Dancing receives a call from a driver in Tucson who sounds as if he's being murdered. Not content to let the police handle the situation, Jessie takes a copy of the tape to the driver's wife who tells her that her husband is very much alive. Taking some time off from her job in Phoenix, Jessie finds that being home in Tucson is bringing her past back to haunt her-- a past that includes being acquitted for murder. During the course of her own investigation, a young woman Jessie meets near the site of the driver's phone call is blown up in her car, and Jessie is once more dealing with a world in which guilt and innocence are both slightly out of focus.

Ure is no stranger to the Sonoran Desert, as you can see from passages like this:

"The steering wheel on Bonita's car was so hot that I wished I had oven mitts. It wasn't supposed to be this hot in September. We should have been on Simmer by now, not Deep Fry. I guided the VW to the freeway with a delicate two-finger grip that would at least cut down on the number of blisters."

Two fingers, Jessie? I've learned to drive with one fingertip! (That way only one fingerprint is burned beyond recognition.)

I enjoy Ure's writing for the setting and for the convoluted plots centered around one very conflicted main character. The more I read about Jessie, the more I realized just how damaged she was. For most people, the setting, the pacing, the plot and the main character are going to be strengths leading to enjoyable reads.

In my case, I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to agree to disagree. I can see all these good things as I read, but in Ure's last two books, The Fault Tree and here in Liars Anonymous, she's created two conflicted characters that drive me crazy. The main character in The Fault Tree was raised to accept blame for everything that happened. It didn't take long for me to stop feeling compassionate and to start wanting to tell her to put on her big girl panties and deal with it. I had roughly the same reaction to Jessie in this book. Jessie's childhood somehow seemed to teach her that no one was going to listen to her, and if she saw wrong being done, she was going to have to take care of it herself. However, it's never a good idea to take the law into your own hands, no matter how much Jessie disagrees with me.

While I found Jessie to be exasperating and infuriating, that doesn't mean you will. Louise Ure is an excellent writer who is skilled at intricate plots and interesting characters. Don't be afraid to give her a try just because this curmudgeon is sometimes easily irritated!

It was the prosecutor at her murder trial who dubbed Jessica ["Jessie"] Gammadge the Queen of Liars Anonymous. She is the first to admit that she is certainly an accomplished liar, and her skills have only improved in the nearly three years since the trial. [The good news: The jury acquitted her; the bad news: she was guilty of the crime.] Despite the jury's finding, Jessie had no choice but to move from Tucson - very few people, including her family [excepting only her father and his then-partner on the police force], believe in her innocence, and with those two exceptions all think of her as the Girl Who Got Away with Murder. In fact, she thinks of herself that way as well.

Jessie, now 32 years old, and calling herself Jessie Dancing [her middle name], is working in Phoenix as a Roadside Assistance Operator when a call comes in from a nearby area from a client needing help after a car crash, during the course of which she hears other voices followed by what appears to be sounds of a beating before the line goes dead. Jessie of course reports the incident to her supervisors and the police, but feels herself drawn to the place where the call came from to see for herself what can be learned from the scene. [The car is found, but there is no sign of the man who made the phone call.] When the latter's wife asks to see her and to hear the tape she agrees to return to Phoenix to see her, and grows suspicious of the woman's truthfulness as well as her too-friendly neighbor, an attorney who Jessie soon discovers is also her lover. [Jessie is, of course, an expert in detecting liars: "There are supposed to be twenty-seven ways to tell if someone is lying . . . But a good liar knows a hundred different ways to convince you that he's telling the truth."] As the investigation goes forward, Jessie finds herself more and more enmeshed, soon putting her a few feet away when a car bomb explodes, killing a young girl who is somehow involved in the car crash incident, and she becomes the focus of a vengeful cop who has always thought of Jessie as 'the one that got away.'

I learned more than I'd ever known about the emergency systems used by auto manufacturers, e.g., they can furnish diagnostics about the car's performance, include a GPS of course, have a strong satellite phone with advisors available at the other end, can tell how fast a car is going when it is hit and whether the brakes were engaged, and can even tell if there was somebody else in the car, where he/they were sitting, and whether they had their seat belts on.

The writing is excellent, equally as good as Ms. Ure's prior novel, "The Fault Tree," which I loved. The sense of place created by the author is wonderful as well, and the reader can feel the heat of the desert, and visualize where "the saguaros stood as dark and still as an army of surprised soldiers in surrender." A terrific read, and one which is recommended.

The premise of this book promised to be good however it did not deliver. The main character has a lot of anger and really needed to learn how to suck it up and move on. I'm getting tired of reading about whiny people who can't get over their past. I'm also tired of reviewers who give "whiner books" 5 star ratings. Heck, even the ending on this book was bad. Sorry I wasted my time.

I have to admit I did not finish this book. The opening chapter is a great set-up, but I got tired of the plot in ensuing chapters depending on our heroine being in just the right place at just the right time for each plot turn. After a while my belief could no longer be suspended and I gave it up.