Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott

Val Penny ♦ May 28, 2018 ♦ Leave a comment

The most recent book of the month in my book group. It is an interesting novel, set in the USA in the 1930s. It is based on the true story of a young woman whose husband, a medical doctor, went to Mexico to recover from his drug habit, leaving his wife lonely and vulnerable.

In Bury Me Deep, the main protagonist, Marion Seeley, is left in Phoenix, Arizona, by her doctor husband as he goes to Mexico to kick his smack habit. Marion gets a job at a hospital and falls in with two other nurses, Ginny and Louise. She soon falls under the spell of a friend of theirs, Joe Lanigan. But Joe’s intentions are not at all honorable.

The quality of the writing in Bury Me Deep is excellent and the story, largely because it is based on a true case, is interesting. However, although the book is not long, unfortunately the distribution of action is uneven. For the first two-thirds of the book, the action crawls along very slowly. I understand that some authors try to build excitement with a long fuse. In this case, I began to feel that the fuse had been extinguished in a bucket of ice water, the story progressed so slowly. The author made up for this in the last seventy pages.

That being said, Bury Me Deep is not a bad book. Megan Abbott’s writing is superbe and the relationship between Lanigan and Mrs. Seeley is well drawn. I was as taken in by Lanigan’s sob story as Marion was. When things started coming unglued, I could not put it down. Too bad the rest of the book was so slow. If the rest of the book had been as good as the last 70-80 pages, this would have been a five star review. Like I said before, the slow pace of the beginning of the book really wrecked Bury Me Deep for me. However, it does make for good discussions in a book group.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the novels Die a Little, Queenpin, The Song Is You, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me, The Fever and You Will Know Me. She was born in the Detroit area of the USA. She graduated from the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. She has taught at NYU, SUNY and the New School University and has served as the John Grisham Writer in Residence at The University of Mississippi.

Val Penny