Search - Bury Me Deep

First Line: Thrill parties every night over on Hussel Street.

It's 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona. Young wife, Marion Seeley, has been left in town while her doctor husband travels to work in Mexico. She has a job as a clerk in a clinic, and she soon falls under the spell of a nurse who also works there. Louise and her roommate Ginny love to party, and slowly but surely they seduce Marion from her strict upbringing and from the promises she made to her husband. It's been months since Marion has heard from her spouse, and handsome Joe Lanigan is right there smiling at her every night when she attends her friends' parties.

Marion's life is about to change forever.

Abbott loosely based her novel on the case of Winnie Ruth Judd, with which I'm familiar. I was surprised by how quickly I left my prior knowledge behind and how totally caught up I became by this story. The author did an excellent job of making me feel as though I were in Depression-era Phoenix without overdoing on either the details or the slang. Even though I knew how the original case had gone, the end of the book was still hard-hitting and unexpected.

I wasn't quite ready for Marion's story to end, and that's one of the many reasons why I'm looking forward to reading Abbott's other books.

After I read "The Song is You" I set about reading everything Megan Abbott had ever written, but unfortunately none of her other novels seems to match it. I liked this one the least. As far as I can tell, it's deliberately written to distance the reader from the characters. Success!

BURY ME DEEP is a stunning piece of noir. Megan Abbott effortlessly brings the reader into 1930's Phoenix and into the parties and excesses. The questionable morality of the time and place is shown to us through the prim and proper eyes of the focus character as we see her, in her loneliness and despair; react, accept, then bend, bend and ultimately break as she comes into her sexual awareness. All too soon, sex and sin becomes, somehow, darker and then darker still.

A stunning work. Painful and wonderful. Fantastic!