The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Life We Bury is one of those books where you can see what’s coming from a long way off, but the characters are compelling enough that you want to keep reading. But then everything happens pretty much just like you predicted and you’re all like, meh. It was a decent book and I did enjoy the characters despite very little growth.

Joe has to write a paper for an English class, so he goes to an old folks’ home thinking there’ll be someone interesting there. Sure enough, there’s a murderer who has been paroled to the home to die of cancer. Joe soon comes to believe the man is innocent. His autistic brother unintentionally plays wing man so Joe can hook up with Lyla, the cute girl next door. Joe has to deal with his alcoholic mom and her abusive boyfriend, gets chased by some bad guys, but SPOILER ALERT … ultimately solves a crime that multiple trained professionals couldn’t solve when it was new.

I would have liked to get to know Carl better. He was the most interesting character in the story, and the catalyst for everything that happened. There was so much back story that could have been revealed. Instead he was kind of the stereotypical good guy in a bad situation in Vietnam who didn’t have it much better when he came home.

I don’t regret the time with this book. It wasn’t bad, just not all that good. The narrator’s voice on the audio didn’t really appeal to me. He sounded like some kind of detached goth twenty-something.

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