Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder by Kerryn Mayne

Meet Lenny Marks, a socially awkward woman, who teaches fifth grade at Selby South Primary School in Belgrave, Australia, in Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder by Kerryn Mayne, which will be released on July 9. Lenny tries to live a small life with routines she does not break by biking home from school at 4 p.m. each day, buying the same groceries for the same meals every week, watching reruns of “Friends” every day, and collecting various editions of The Hobbit. She has a make-believe roommate named Monica, with whom she has an ongoing game of Scrabble.

 

What’s wrong with Lenny? Apparently, something tragic that she tries desperately to keep out of her mind. She only allows herself to think that her mother and step-father abandoned her to her grandmother Zanny, who also deserted her, making her a foster child of Fay and Robert Marks.

 

When she receives a letter from a parole board that arrives at her school, she starts to come undone. While she dodges reading the letter as long as she can, she soon starts receiving phone calls from the Victim Support Unit that she lets go to her answering machine and then ignores, and her schedules fall to pieces. Fortunately, some in her school community, her foster mother Fay, and Ned, the guy who fancies her, offer support as she struggles to deal with the consequences of the ruling of the parole board that shakes her to her core. Forced to face what really happened to her as a child, Lenny can crumble or emerge stronger.

                                           

Author Kerryn Mayne is a police officer. When not at work attempting to solve crimes, she writes about crime, as in her other novel, Joy Moody Is Out Of Time. She lives in the bayside suburbs of Melbourne with her family.

 

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting April 12, 2024.

I would like to thank St. Martin’s Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.