I can’t help but be so very disappointed after reading this book; it just had so much potential! However, The Last Thing He Told Me ended up being a solid 3 out of 5 stars for me. I have to admit, the book had me hooked at its beginning with the sentences, “You see it all the time on television. There’s a knock at the front door. And, on the other side, someone is waiting to tell you the news that changes everything. On television, it’s usually a police chaplain or a firefighter… But when I open the door… [i]t’s a twelve-year-old girl, in a soccer uniform.” A strong
beginning. However, the novel ended up just gradually tapering off in quality from there. The story’s main character is Hannah Hall, a 40-year-oldish woman who’s the stepmom to a sixteen-year-old girl named Bailey. Hannah’s been married to Owen, Bailey’s biological father, “for a little over a year” when their world comes crashing down. It’s on NPR. CNN. NBC. There’s been a major financial fraud scandal associated with the tech start-up that Owen has been working for as one of the senior programmers. Around the time that a shocked Hannah gets wind of this, she receives a handwritten note from Owen reading, “Protect her,” via the 12-year-old girl at her doorstep while Bailey finds a similar ominous note from her father telling her to listen to Hannah
–along with a bag full of over 600 thousand dollars in cash. Soon enough, FBI agents and even a U.S. Marshal show up at their home, prompting Hannah to look deeper into Owen’s whereabouts. This then leads Hannah and Bailey on a little “excursion” to Austin, Texas, where they try to recover pieces of Owen’s past and put them together to make sense of the situation.
The biggest flaw I saw with this book was with the characters. Laura Dave simply failed to make me care about any of them. Hannah comes off as too desperate to gain “approval” from and build a relationship with Bailey, who acts standoffish to her. Bailey also acts kind of bratty and self-centered toward Hannah when Hannah’s doing all she can to get in her good graces, which made Bailey very hard to like for me. The author tries to explain Bailey’s snobbish behavior by saying she’s a sixteen-year-old, but I think that’s an overused stereotype and that sixteen-year-olds are fully capable of being respectful towards their guardians. I didn’t care much for Owen either –in fact, the only thing I was really able to garner about him was that he was caring and kind– which are nice characteristics but didn’t provide me with enough insight into him to make me emotionally invested in his sudden disappearance.
I feel like a hallmark of truly great thrillers is that they keep you wondering and asking questions. As you flip through the pages, they keep you saying with gritted teeth, “No, it can’t end here! I need –I must– find out!” Very much on the contrary with this book, I truly felt like I could have stopped at any point, and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
One of the lamest (for the lack of a better term) segments of the book is where Bailey suddenly goes missing from the hotel room that she and Hannah are staying at in Austin at the same moment Hannah has some sort of epiphany and realizes who Owen and Bailey truly are. When US Marshals find Bailey and Hannah is notified, Bailey soon tells her that she got a call with a bunch of static and went outside to get a better signal. Okay, she could have thought that call was her dad Owen trying to get in touch with her, but how did she get lost after that? She could have easily retraced her steps to the hotel room or asked a stranger if they could help her with directions. It’s not that hard, making her brief disappearance in the book a cheap shot at generating some suspense.
Throughout the book, I was wondering why Owen didn’t just seek the aid of US Marshals straightaway, one of whom he seemed to know personally (by the name of Grady). The author explains this by saying the US Marshals somehow compromised his and his daughter’s (Bailey’s) security through some minor flaw in the past, which caused him to not fully trust them with his family’s safety. “Okay,” I thought, “then what are his alternative options? Oh, right. Leave your wife and daughter with vague and cryptic messages while taking off for the hills. They’ll surely be safer then.” Either he was acting asinine or full-on panicked –there’s no other conceivable explanation for this. Hannah ends up not trusting the US Marshals either! She instead chooses to seek out Bailey’s grandfather and Owen’s father-in-law, Nicholas, who also happens to be the whole reason why Owen’s on the run in the first place. To give you a bit –well maybe quite a bit– of context, apparently, Nicholas was a successful defense lawyer for those associated with some crime syndicate when his daughter, Owen’s first wife and Bailey’s biological mom, mysteriously died in a car accident. Owen, who was devastated, pinned the blame on Nicholas’s ties to the world of crime to the death of his wife and helped charge Nicholas and some criminal associates with some crimes. Eventually, Nicholas was put behind bars, and the crime syndicate was unsurprisingly not so happy with Owen, causing him and Bailey to “go into hiding” (i.e. masking their identities) and act the way he did when the financial scandal struck the start-up, as his face would then be publicly exposed. But getting back to what I was saying originally, as opposed to the much more secure option of the US Marshals where she could have even reunited with Owen, she instead takes the gamble of trying to negotiate with someone deeply tied to the crime world for the safety of Bailey and herself! It was just so…frustrating to progress through this book, not to mention that there’s another character named Carl, an apparent close friend of Owen’s who seems to serve no real purpose in the story except take up space on the pages.
In conclusion, The Last Thing He Told Me is a very average thriller book that wasn’t really my cup of tea. But who knows, maybe you’ll end up enjoying it. I think you’d make better use of your time looking into other books, but simply trying this book out can’t hurt. Adieu!
Review by ~ Andrew
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