Lay Your Body Down

A Novel of Suspense

By: Amy Suiter Clarke

Narrated by: Helen Laser, Hallie Ricardo, Carlotta Brentan

Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

A People magazine must-read of summer!

"Suiter Clarke paints a devastating portrait of a cultlike institution and a town in its thrall. It’s even worse than we imagined."—New York Times Book Review

A young woman returns to her rural Minnesota hometown, where a radical evangelical pastor has poisoned everyone’s minds—and may be covering up a murder.

After Del Walker fled her small hometown and its cult-like church, she vowed to never return. The man she loved, Lars, left her to marry the local golden girl Eve, and their romance is now the focus of Eve’s viral blog espousing the pastor’s conservative philosophy about women and marriage. But six years later, Lars is suddenly killed, and she’s convinced it couldn’t have been an accident.

When Del returns to her hometown for the funeral, she discovers the now mega-church—and the insidious, patriarchal teachings of Pastor Rick Franklin—has grown not only in size but in influence. Eve was clearly discontent in her marriage, despite the carefully constructed “Noble Wife” positivity of her blog posts, and Del knows better than anyone just how far she will go to get what she wants. Del is determined to cut through the church’s lies and corruption to find out who killed Lars—even if it means confronting the religious trauma she’s spent years trying to bury.

"There are midnight-snack-style thrillers, and those that stick with you. This one's the latter."—People magazine

©2023 Amy Suiter Clarke (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

Very entertaining & satisfying read

Very entertaining & satisfying read. Not a clichéd young- woman-as-the- flawed- heroine- story. I hope there are more books to come by this author!

Triggering, But Good.

As a deconstructed survivor of the Fundamentalist Evangelical / Purity Movement, this is an important story. Though it's fiction, the events in the story are anything but. It echoes the harm that was done by Joshua Harris and his, "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," a work that he eventually went on to denounce, but not before it ruined hundreds of thousands of lives and forever scarred many others. It echoes the destruction caused (and still being caused) by Focus on the Family & its dozens of offshoots, True Love Waits Conferences, and countless other multi-million dollar enterprises that thrive under the guise of helping families when, in all reality, what they do is enable abusers--parents who abuse their children, husbands who abuse their wives, entire congregations of people who abuse their vulnerable members, especially the youth. Anyone who has never been entrenched or indoctrinated into that culture may have a difficult time understanding how realistic the events in this story actually are. On a technical level, I feel it could have used some heavy editing. At times the pacing was a bit inconsistent, and while I absolutely don't mind jumping around from timeline to timeline and/or going back and forth from past to present as long as the timelines form a cohesive pattern, the time hopping in this story seemed a bit disordered and disjointed, jumping from present to 2011 in the protagonist's journal to 2014 in the Noble Wife blog...it felt like the timeline was driven by what the author wanted to reveal and when rather than the revelations being driven by the timeline. I also wasn't a huge fan of one of the twists close to the end that seemed to be thrown in just for the sake of having a twist that, imo, did nothing to enhance the story or give me a sense of, "whoa, mind blown...how did I not see that coming??" More and more authors are falling victim to the trope that they must throw in one betrayal at the end by the person you'd least expect, one on whom suspicion was never cast, and there were no reasonable clues provided to the reader to lead up to the moment. For a twist like that to work, when it happens, the reader should think, "oh wow, this was staring me right in the face, and that's what this clue meant, when I had interpreted it this other way!!" That wasn't the case here, and it actually detracted from the story. The story could have gone the exact same way with the same exact result / ending without this twist, which is what makes it feel thrown in for the sake of it. Those nits aside, I do think it's well-written and definitely a subject that needs far more mainstream attention. The millions of people who have been hurt by the Fundamentalist church, their infiltration in positions of power and public office where they have no business being, and the trauma that has resulted from their actions are long overdue for some justice, and the more stories that are brought to light, the better.

The ending…

Well written… coming from a past in the fundamentalist Christian church I understood the main character and all the corruption. A good read and the ending was well written.

Intriguing

Really enjoyed the narration. And the story kept my attention the entire time. With a surprising twist I wasn’t expecting.