Lie After Lie

The True Story of a Master of Deception, Betrayal, and Murder

By: Lara Bricker

Narrated by: Tanya Eby

A seemingly perfect world held an even more unlikely killer...

Julie Keown had a great job, financial security, and a perfect husband who was attending Harvard Business School. But after Julie suddenly died, and doctors discovered she’d been poisoned with the main ingredient in antifreeze, her parents began to suspect that her husband, James, was not so perfect. This blow-by-blow account shows how investigators and state police unraveled James Keown’s chilling web of deceit.

©2010 Lara Bricker. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Written as if You’re Living It - Perfectly Performed

The story unfolds through the thoughts of the characters impacted by a charming psychopath. You live the story through the thoughts of the characters about the events in the story. This allows you to see through their eyes and understand the mindset and techniques that caused their deception. The story narrator has the perfect pitch and pace throughout her presentation. She really brought the story to life.

Justice for Heartland Nurse

Just a heartbreaking story told so well. Big city cops that gave justice to homeland!

Love Lara Bricker

Perfect. Loved the book and loved it was about a case I personally didn't know much about.

Very good recording

This story is so outrageous that it almost seems unbelievable--but it is a real story and author here does excellent job of telling the story and showing the lies. Good narration.

Boring writing and lack of any narrative arc

I was very disappointed by this book. I am a big fan of Bricker and her colleagues at Crime Writers On, and I was not expecting to be writing this review, but this is what I think of the book and I need to be honest. I'll certainly read the next one she writes (and I do hope she writes another), but this one didn't do it for me.

The Narration:

I'll start with the things that aren't Bricker's fault. This narrator was milquetoast trying too hard. Tanya Eby speaks in what sounds like the volume of a normal voice, but she is performing in a breathy whisper that sounds overdramatic. This comes out most strongly when the narrator announces the chapter numbers. The final syllable is often inflected up, as if she were trying to make the chapter number sound dramatic somehow. It feels both cheap and ridiculous. The narrator sounds like she is trying to imitate an old woman, the type that would typically narrate one of the C-level back titles by Ann Rule. I expect the publisher knows the target demographics better than me, but Rule's catalog, after The Stranger Beside Me, is mostly tawdry meditations on evil designed to make old women clutch their pearls. Lara Bricker is young and hip, and I think she deserved better. (So did the story. The vocal allusion to the type of tawdry Ann Rule cases paints Julie Keown's with the same brush, which is undeserved.)

The Writing:

Bricker's writing has almost no awareness of any larger narrative arc, as each chapter feels like it is a news article telling a piece of the story from that chapter's primary interviewee's recollection. Kudos for Bricker for trying to include lots of voices, but each chapter feels completely isolated from the rest rather than part of some whole story. Details are constantly repeated, with no signal at all from the narrator to the audience demonstrating awareness that the audience already knows x or y piece of information. Bricker hasn't told us a story, she's given us a 30,000 word AP style article, broken into 30-odd sections that don't know they are sitting next to each other. Even Bricker's attribution tags are straight AP style, with no variation. There is no sense of narrative at all, no story. Just detail after detail that feels like padding.

These might be assets for doing traditional journalism, but for a book-length treatment, it's almost unreadable.

The Case:

The case Bricker follows is interesting, but perhaps only at the 3-star level. If you've read one story like this, you've read this story. There is a detective, a family, a cluster of personal and professional acquaintances who are by turns saddened by the murder and shocked at the lies of the perpetrator. The killer's mother stands by him to the last, and there are tinges of odd behavior from her at times, but the killer's mother never gets interesting in the way Ruth Coe (mother of the South Hill Rapist) does. But, at its heart, though the case stretched on for four years, there isn't actually much interesting information, and Bricker's narrative technique makes everything feel like filler.