Roman Clodia's Reviews > I Have Some Questions For You

There was a woman who managed to cut her captor's driving license into twenty little pieces and swallow them so when they found her body his ID would be in her stomach. And they arrested him. They brought him in for questioning. But they never pressed charges against him.

This is a messy, untidy book but for me it's a good form of disarray. I'll say upfront that it feels about 100 pages too long, and the two parts split at about 70% of the way through which makes it feel uneven - but its awkwardness feels purposeful because the book is dramatising and interrogating issues that are themselves thorny and complicated, often subjective and not easily ruled for in general terms.

At the heart of the story is the murder of Thalia Keith, a high school student, for whose killing Omar Evans, a young and Black athletics trainer has been incarcerated for twenty seven years. Issues of misogyny and racist stereotyping are front and centre but interwined are all kinds of other themes including privilege and class, miscarriages of justice, perceptions and memory, the rise of true crime podcasts and a resultant subsidiary public and unprofessional parallel 'legal process'.

The story is narrated by Bodie Kane, once an outsider classmate of Thalia, now an academic and professional podcaster in her own right with a messy life of her own - not least having a husband who has been indicted on social media as a man who has taken advantage of his status as an artist to have an asymmetrical sexual relationship with a younger woman...

What I appreciated about this book is the way Makkai tackles zeitgeisty flashpoint topics with nuance and complexity: is every relationship between an older man and a younger woman automatically exploitative? Why is femicide still not taken seriously around the world? Why is it so easy for a young Black man to be imprisoned despite a lack of non-circumstantial evidence, and why is that conviction so hard to overturn in the face of alternative evidence? What role does a fancy school's status and connections play in the face of murder - and what happens when a case is built on the wavery testimony of a group of anxious high school students? When due legal process is itself shown to be unreliable and unjust, is it right that podcasters should be able to set themselves up as investigators and quasi judges and juries?

Makkai takes a scenario that is almost a cliché of popular crime fiction: the woman who returns to a place she once lived and where she was involved in a murder who now questions all that her teenage self once knew - and turns it all on its head with a clever, probing way of problematising that scenario. And I can see why crime fiction fans may not like this: (view spoiler)[ as in real life, there's no cosy ending that crime fiction depends on: justice is not seen to be done, and there is no satisfying closure (hide spoiler)] - but for me that's all in line with the mature and unflinching gaze of this book.