Louise Ure

Forcing Amaryllis by Louise Ure steps outside the formulaic mystery with a touching and engaging story about a sister's determination to find justice for her sister, Amaryllis, a rape and attempted murder victim. Calla Gentry is assigned to work as a jury consultant as part of the defense team of an accused rapist and murderer. Calla see eerie similarities to her sister's case, but then must reconcile the differences in Amaryllis's account of her account and the facts of the current case. show more Amaryllis's comatose state as a result of a suicide attempt make her unavailable to help with the case. Calla's discoveries take her on a path that uncovers a string of victims that haunt her. Calla's search jeopardizes her job, her relationships, her sense of self, and her life. Ure creates a character in Calla who is searching to regain her strength and sense of self. Her struggle will leave the reader wanting to know her better and who will stay with the reader well beyond the final page of the book. show less

First Line: I got away with murder once, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen again.

Roadside assistance operator Jessie Dancing receives a call from a driver in Tucson who sounds as if he's being murdered. Not content to let the police handle the situation, Jessie takes a copy of the tape to the driver's wife who tells her that her husband is very much alive. Taking some time off from her job in Phoenix, Jessie finds that being home in Tucson is bringing her past back to haunt show more her-- a past that includes being acquitted for murder. During the course of her own investigation, a young woman Jessie meets near the site of the driver's phone call is blown up in her car, and Jessie is once more dealing with a world in which guilt and innocence are both slightly out of focus.

Ure is no stranger to the Sonoran Desert, as you can see from passages like this:

"The steering wheel on Bonita's car was so hot that I wished I had oven mitts. It wasn't supposed to be this hot in September. We should have been on Simmer by now, not Deep Fry. I guided the VW to the freeway with a delicate two-finger grip that would at least cut down on the number of blisters."

Two fingers, Jessie? I've learned to drive with one fingertip! (That way only one fingerprint is burned beyond recognition.)

I enjoy Ure's writing for the setting and for the convoluted plots centered around one very conflicted main character. The more I read about Jessie, the more I realized just how damaged she was. For most people, the setting, the pacing, the plot and the main character are going to be strengths leading to enjoyable reads.

In my case, I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to agree to disagree. I can see all these good things as I read, but in Ure's last two books, The Fault Tree and here in Liars Anonymous, she's created two conflicted characters that drive me crazy. The main character in The Fault Tree was raised to accept blame for everything that happened. It didn't take long for me to stop feeling compassionate and to start wanting to tell her to put on her big girl panties and deal with it. I had roughly the same reaction to Jessie in this book. Jessie's childhood somehow seemed to teach her that no one was going to listen to her, and if she saw wrong being done, she was going to have to take care of it herself. However, it's never a good idea to take the law into your own hands, no matter how much Jessie disagrees with me.

While I found Jessie to be exasperating and infuriating, that doesn't mean you will. Louise Ure is an excellent writer who is skilled at intricate plots and interesting characters. Don't be afraid to give her a try just because this curmudgeon is sometimes easily irritated! show less

A car mechanic is the only witness to the escape of a couple of killers from a small-scale robbery gone wrong. What the killers don't know is that the witness is blind. Not that it matters - she still can provide useful information to the police about their vehicle. As she dodges their attempts to silence her, she copes with long-term guilt that the accident that led to her blindness also caused her niece's death. The image of a fault tree - a form of analysis to see how failures in a system show more are interlinked - is a neat metaphor for the book. The hapless killers (particularly one of them) are portrayed sensitively, and the characters in general are well drawn. The "fem jep" nature of the plot is offset by the interesting character who has a strong independent streak (you'd have to, to work as a blind car mechanic) and the ending fuses those together so that it's not just over the top, it flies exuberantly right over Mount Everest. show less

I keep saying I don't really like thrillers and then I keep reading and enjoying the ones that come my way. I enjoyed [b:The Fault Tree|2345923|The Fault Tree|Louise Ure|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gfp1cpnnL._SL75_.jpg|2352633] primarily because of the spunky protagonist, a woman auto mechanic who has been blind for several years. When she is knocked down by a car on her way home from work one night, she is drawn into a murder investigation. With changing points of view and show more chapters of varying lengths, Ure blends the amateur sleuth with police procedural and gives us some insights into the mind of one of the criminals as well. I stayed up far too late finishing this book; I have to note that my spouse didn't care for it quite as much, partly because of the psychological problems of the protagonist. show less