Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder

November 29, 2022
In the lush, comforting Dandenongs, east of Melbourne, primary school teacher Lenny Marks is living a very organised life. She rides her bike to work, has dutifully polite conversations with her colleagues, buys groceries at McKnight’s General Store, pretends to know the TV shows that handsome Ned at the checkout talks about, and her sole weekend interaction is with the driver that delivers her chicken pad Thai on Saturdays. Once a fortnight, she visits her foster mother. And Lenny absolutely, resolutely, does not think about what happened in her childhood—until the day a letter from the parole board arrives. What this unleashes in Lenny will be her undoing, unless—with the help of those she doesn’t yet realise she can count on—it will be a liberation. Lenny is an occasionally frustrating, entirely endearing unreliable narrator, one to root for with almost painful force. The reader does not get the full picture of what happened to Lenny Marks back when she was Helena Winters, but the ripples of her childhood pain are still being felt as she grapples with every social interaction and finding the right people to trust. Lenny’s journey is both harrowing and a balm. It is for those who loved the emotional resonance of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine or the suburban Australian beauty and darkness of Holly Throsby’s Clarke—and don’t mind a little canine thievery on the side. Fiona Hardy is a children’s author and a bookseller at Readings. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

May 20, 2024
Mayne debuts with the underwhelming story of an awkward middle school teacher in Australia whose repressed childhood memories come roaring to the surface. Lenny Marks, 37, generally sticks to herself, though she bonds with her grocer Ned and her elderly neighbor Maureen. One day, Lenny drops in for a visit and finds Maureen unconscious on the floor. The sight triggers flashes of a traumatic childhood event, and Lenny begins to piece together that the scar on her thigh came from her alcoholic stepfather Fergus. The complete details of the incident come out later, after calls from a prison parole board reveal Fergus is incarcerated and that he victimized Lenny, which adds a sense of foreboding and sets the stage for a climactic showdown. Mayne convinces in her depiction of Lenny’s anxious inner life, though a romantic subplot is devoid of chemistry, and a couple left-field twists contort the story rather than enhance it. This doesn’t quite come together. Agent: Elaine Spencer, Knight Agency.