Title: THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME
Author: Laura Dave
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Read: May 2021
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟1/2
Book Description:
We all have stories we never tell.
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved
wife of one year: Protect her.
Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note
refers: Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother
tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new
stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered; as the FBI
arrests Owen’s boss; as a US Marshal and FBI agents arrive at her Sausalito
home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was.
And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and
why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth, together. But as they start
putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they are also
building a new future. One neither Hannah nor Bailey could have anticipated.
My musings:
The theme "how well do you REALLY know your
spouse" never gets old for me in a mystery. There are so many endless
possibilities: your partner is a serial killer, a spy, an undercover agent, an
alien life form from another planet, a person in witness protection, an
undercover agent, a robot, a polygamist who has another three wives in
different states. The skill lies a) in hooking the reader and getting them
emotionally invested; and b) in the gradual unveiling of the mystery, like the
unwrapping of a pass-the-parcel where the final product is something the reader
has coveted all along. It's been done so many times before that it's not easy
to come up with a premise a diehard thriller fan won't work out in the first
few chapters. And whilst THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME didn’t reinvent the
wheel, the gradual offering up of clues was intriguing and kept me eagerly
reading on!
It's exactly in this very predicament Hannah finds herself in when her husband
Owen fails to come home one night, leaving her only with a short cryptic note
delivered to her door: “Protect her.” “Her” meaning his beloved
teenage daughter Bailey. Hannah knows that he would never willingly leave
Bailey unless something was terribly wrong. The more she looks into Owen's past
in the hope of finding him, the more Hannah realises that she doesn't know her
husband at all. Was everything he has told her about himself a lie?
Laura Dave knows all the tricks of hooking her readers and taking them along
for the ride. I loved the sense of danger and suspense as Hannah's life
unravelled and the gradual unveiling of clues that had me questioning
everything. As Hannah's search for the truth put her own life in danger, the
atmosphere became more claustrophobic and I constantly questioned what I would
do if I was in her situation, even if I thought that Hannah remained
surprisingly calm considering the circumstances. Which was probably my only
little quibble with the story and the one thing that stood in my way of bonding
emotionally with Hannah - maybe I'm just more emotionally unstable? I think I
would have believed her predicament a bit better if she'd shown more
vulnerability in an impossibly difficult situation. I also wasn’t totally
convinced with Owen’s motives and thinking processes, but without his POV of
the mess he got himself in it was tough to judge!
That said, THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME held plenty of surprises in store and
entertained from beginning to end. It will appeal to readers who enjoy a
slower, character driven mystery with a slow unravelling of clues rather than
an action packed, suspenseful read. It relies on the unspoken secrets in a
marriage that can turn our lives upside down in an instant, and the
relationship dynamics in step families. I enjoyed it and look forward to
reading more from this author in future.
Thank
you to Netgalley and Serpent's Tail for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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