James Renner

In 1990, sixteen year old Lisa Pruitt was found murdered in her affluent neighborhood of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. She had snuck out of her house after midnight and was stabbed just a few yards from her boyfriend's home, a boy who had invited her. He had been released from a psychiatric hospital just that day and they had been apart for several weeks.

The police investigation focused on a schoolmate who had long been known as am angry weirdo, and the police may have seen him as their only suspect due to a group of high-achieving school mates who pointed the finger at him. He was put on trial, his life ruined, but was he the murderer?
Renner's account of the murder, the trial, and the lives of this group of wealthy, nerdy kids is fascinating. The problems I had with the book are when the author injects his own opinions, swearing to let us know he believes something was unfair, or contriving to tell a backstory of one of the players in order to inject his own politics. Even stranger, he includes a text he received from another reporter telling him that his previous work has been irresponsible. When he sticks to reporting the facts of the case, he does so in a riveting style, but sometimes he goes off on a tangent about himself.… (altro)

'The Man From Primrose Lane' is a very likeable book. It's well-written, original, tramples genre boundaries, has an intriguing mystery (maybe more than one) at its heart and is populated with memorable characters that are more than plot devices. It's filled with scenes that are little works of art on their own: the visit to the robot factory, the incident with the pianist on the cruise ship, the bookshop meet-cute that isn't or shouldn't be a meet-cute, the discovery of the body, the first interview with the detective in a smoke-filled windowless room that smells of stale hot dogs. These scenes grabbed my imagination and demanded that I pay attention, maybe even applaud.

So, if it has all those good attributes, why am I abandoning this fourteen-hour book after three and a half hours?

This is going to sound odd, but I don't trust this book. If I'm going to spend fourteen hours reading a novel, I need to be confident that both the journey and the destination are worthwhile. I suspect that 'The Man From Primrose Lane' is heading off towards a complex but improbable territory that I'm not going to find satisfying, I feel like I watching a very long magic act or perhaps a Long Con, where the author is distracting me with good quality mainstream scenes so that the flourish at the end will come as a surprise.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing, if I'm reading an Agatha Christie novel where it's all part of the fun, or even if I reading a Science Fiction mystery with a murder at its heart.

So why is it a problem here?

It's probably just me but I feel about this book the same way that I feel when I'm introduced to a charming, charismatic person with an agenda: defensive, untrusting, mildly offended. I see why other people admire the person but that just reinforces my aversion.

For some reason, I feel like the contract between writer and reader in this book is, well, dishonest is to strong a word, perhaps unbalanced in the author's favour says it better.

Anyway, all I know is that the more I read, the less I believe and the more I'm looking for the lie behind the smile. That's not fun so I'm setting this aside.

Here's an extract from the start of the audiobook, so you can form an impression of the book for yourself.

https://soundcloud.com/bolindaaudio/man-from-primrose-lane… (altro)