Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder: A Novel

by Kerryn Mayne

Lenny Marks is excellent at not having a life.

She bikes home from work at exactly 4pm each day, buys the same groceries for the same meals every week, and owns thirty-six copies of The Hobbit (currently arranged by height). The closest thing she has to a friendship is playing Scrabble against an imaginary Monica Gellar while watching Friends reruns.

And Lenny Marks is very, very good at not remembering what happened the day her mother and stepfather disappeared when she was still a child. The day a voice in the back of her mind started whispering, You did this.

Until a letter from the parole board arrives in the mail - and when her desperate attempts to ignore it fail, Lenny starts to unravel. As long-buried memories come to the surface, Lenny’s careful routines fall apart. For the first time, she finds herself forced to connect with the community around her, and unexpected new relationships begin to bloom. Lenny Marks may finally get a life - but what if her past catches up to her first?

Equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kerryn Mayne’s stunning debut is an irresistible novel about truth, secrets, vengeance, and family lost and found, with a heroine who's simply unforgettable.

• ISBN10: 1250340101
• ISBN13: 9781250340108
• Publish Date: 19 August 2024 (first published 9 July 2024)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: St Martin's Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: http://melia.co.uk/page/detail/?k=9781250340108

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder is an intriguingly appealing debut crime novel by Kerryn Mayne. Released 9th July 2024 by Macmillan on their St. Martin's Press imprint, it's 352 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats (paperback due out from the same publisher in late 2nd quarter 2025). It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout.

This is very very much a character driven story featuring a neurodivergent main character, strongly suppresed trauma memories, and a quite surprisingly deeply moving story in places. There are trigger warnings aplenty, domestic violence, child abuse, PTSD, trauma, suppressed memories, and more; it's a comprehensive shopping list. 

The author writes with unvarnished, sometimes clinical detachment on otherwise horrific actions and it is impressively effective, given the slightly wonky personality of main character Lenny. 

The denouement and resolution are satisfying, if also slightly off kilter and unsettling. 

Four stars. All in all an effective and very well written debut. It would be a good choice for public or home library acquisition, buddy read or mystery book club selection. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

[Jeff Sexton]

Like Great Gatsby: SLOW Start, Explosive Ending, *NOT* Neurodivergent. I tell the story often of my experience with The Great Gatbsy. Back in sophomore year of HS, it was actually assigned as summer reading before the school year. I didn't read it. Every time I tried to open it, the first chapters were just SO UTTERLY BORING that I literally couldn't keep my eyes open. Managed to bullshit through the discussion of it during my International Baccalaureate level English class that fall. Switched to a school without an IB program in Spring Semester, where now I had one of those old school even then (late 90s) slap-the-knuckles-with-a-ruler type English teachers. This lady *forced* me to read the book via making it a point to call on me to read out loud during class. She knew I HATED it, I wasn't subtle about my disdain at all, and I had a superiority complex at this new school to boot.

 

But god DAMN if she didn't wind up getting me through those first boring chapters, where the tale then woke up and became truly one of the great American books, particularly of its period and truly quite possibly ever.

 

I tell that story here because it directly applies to this book. This book is S L O W at first and utterly, completely, mind bogglingly BORING. There simply is no way around that. Even at 20% in, I was commenting on social media (without naming that I was reading this book) that it was horrible.

 

And then...

 

And then you get to the point - roughly halfway in - where you find out WHY the front half was so utterly boring.  

 

And like Gatsby, this point turns the novel on its head and makes it a truly great book. No, it still isn't Gatbsy's level, but this is where it is going to make you *feel*. It is going to make the room so dusty you'll be verifying that the walls around you haven't suddenly collapsed, because you're going to be crying so hard during some of this next section that you're going to be snotting all over the place and finding it very difficult to breathe. Mayne manages to utterly bore your mind before absolutely DESTROYING your heart worse than a direct hit from a G2 Research RIP round would.

 

This back half is truly what makes the book, so fight through the boredom of the front half - it really does get so very much better.

 

Oh, and the neurodivergent thing; A lot of reviewers (I'm somewhere right around the 1,000th review on at least one review site) have mentioned that this book features a neurodivergent protagonist. It does not. The words "neurodivergent", "spectrum", "Autism", or even "Asberger's" are nowhere in the text of this tale, and while the front part of the book in particular (and to a slightly lesser extent the back part as well) characterize our protagonist as *stereotypically* neurodivergent, just because someone acts according to a stereotype does not mean they actually *are* whatever the stereotype is supposed to be of. Indeed, we actually get an explanation in that back half of the book that is *not* any form of actual neurodivergence so much as ... something else that is directly explained and explored (part of what makes the heart shatter so much), but which would be a spoiler to reveal here.

 

Overall truly a tale of two halves as far as the reader experience goes, but absolutely one you should read.

 

Very much recommended.