Review of This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum

This romance-laced mystery centered around a podcast and its host's disappearance includes some far-fetched-feeling elements, but Tiffany Crum's debut novel keeps up the pacing and kept me interested throughout, including the renegade justice that's served up.

Benny and Joy are best friends who met under unusual circumstances; Joy, a narcoleptic, was asleep outside a bar bathroom when Benny woke her up. (Side note: this is presented as a zany meet-cute but felt a little jarringly oddball and potentially extremely dangerous to Joy.)

Now Joy and Benny host one of the most popular podcasts around. Through their natural banter and conversations they came up with what turned out to be a slam-dunk premise: One friend poses a highly specific situation and asks the other to imagine how they would escape it. Then the duo reveals a real-life situation that has occured and which applies to the scenario and they speak to experts about how best to survive it. The podcast is entertaining, a huge hit--and extremely lucrative. In fact, Benny and Joy are in talks to sell the podcast for millions.

When Joy and her husband Xander, who's been highly involved in the management of the podcast (and Benny and Joy's finances), go missing under mysterious circumstances, Benny is suspect number one. Because of this, and because of his adoration of Joy, Benny feels it's up to him to put together the pieces of what happened--and bring them home.

It becomes clear that Benny and Joy have in the past had feelings for each other; that Xander has secretly and not-so-secretly been controlling and interfering; that Benny's ex-wife is a saint and also more key to the story than one might have anticipated; and that many things are not as they seem.

The pacing of This Story Might Save Your Life moves along; Crum tracks back and forth in time, relies on snippets of the podcast as context, and shares various characters' points of view to reveal the real story piece by piece, all while present-day events continue to unfold.

Joy is narcoleptic, has suffered from trauma, and is at times hallucinatory, so she is an unreliable narrator--until we know that we're getting the full story toward the end of the book. When the full extent of the secrets and lies at the heart of the mystery are revealed, some of them feel somewhat far-fetched and like significant reaches, but I was most intrigued by one unexpected key player, a seemingly unlikely but essential piece of the justice that is ultimately served up.

I listened to This Story Might Save Your Life as an audiobook.

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This Story Might Save Your Life is Tiffany Crum's debut novel.

Another mystery that invoves a podcaster is the great novel Listen for the Lie.