Trust Me When I Lie

June 15, 2019
Australian stand-up comedian Stevenson's fiction debut is anything but funny: It's the dark-hued story of a true-crime television producer whose miniseries is instrumental in freeing a wrongly convicted killer who might not be so innocent after all. "I'm not a journalist," Jack Quick tells anyone who'll listen, and you have to admit he has a point. His TV series on the murder of English backpacker Eliza Dacey, which throws serious doubt on the culpability of Curtis Wade, the restaurateur on whose property Eliza's strangled, mutilated corpse was found, made him just as famous as Curtis and tied him even more inescapably to his notorious subject from the moment a new trial set Curtis free four years after his conviction. An even more important disqualification than Jack's celebrity is the need he feels to lie to Curtis and his kid sister, Lauren, his lawyer, Alexis White, prosecuting attorney Theodore Piper, Sgt. Andrew Freeman of the New South Wales Police, and even Detective Ian McCarthy, the NSWP ally who keeps feeding him information. The sad truth is that much as Jack hates lying, he's gotten used to it ever since a devastating childhood accident left his older brother, Liam, in a persistent vegetative state. His unexpected discomfort with Curtis' release is multiplied a thousandfold by a second murder with unmistakable echoes of the first. Is a copycat trying to get Curtis locked up again, or is Curtis celebrating his newfound freedom by acting out in fury against the enemies who locked him up in the first place? Although the threats to Jack's life multiply, he's actually facing psychological threats much worse than death. Stevenson locks his remarkably small cast in a cage where they do unspeakable things to each other.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 30, 2019
Jack Quick, the tormented protagonist of Australian author Stevenson’s darkly devious first novel, produces a popular true crime TV series showing how Curtis Wade was unfairly convicted for the murder of vineyard worker Eliza Dacey four years earlier in the outback hamlet of Birravale. Then Jack finds something suggesting that the man might actually be guilty. But that doesn’t fit the dramatic, emotionally satisfying story he has created, so he suppresses the evidence, rationalizing that it could have been planted by the real killer. When Curtis is released after a retrial and another murder soon follows, Jack regrets covering his mistakes with cleverly constructed lies. Allied with Curtis’s sister, Jack shakes up Birravale to see how antagonism between rival winemakers and local distrust of outsiders created a tense atmosphere in which Curtis could be railroaded—whether or not he was guilty. Besides struggling with his own bulimia and crippling self-doubt, Jack must strain to see through everybody else’s lies. Stevenson is a splendidly vivid and tricky writer. Readers will be curious to see what he comes up with next.

July 1, 2019
Four years ago, Eliza Dacey was murdered and her mutilated body left in shrubbery at the edge of a sleepy Australian village. A local man, Curtis Wade, was a suspect, but there were reasons to think he was innocent; the cops and the citizenry didn't care, and Wade was imprisoned. Now, four years later, TV producer Jack Quick's documentary helps get Wade a new trial, and he is set free. But Quick is left with a bad taste and a familiar question: Is truth really knowable in a world of media manipulation? Then there's a fresh killing, and Quick must stop theorizing, turn detective, and solve murders. What follows is a fascinating narrative interrupted, according to the modern style, by introspection, family histories, and a detailed account of a road trip. Readers who stay the course will enjoy some vivid writing: a thin man is tightly wrapped in sinew, a skeleton wound in rope and dipped in skin. There's also a fine, twisty ending that sort of answers Jack's question. If not for the media . . . (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)