The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me
Author: Laura Dave
Genre: Mystery / Thriller
Date: 05 September 2021
Rating: 3 stars
Review: I love picking up a book at the beginning of a long flight or drive and then being so engrossed in the story that I don’t even realise I have reached my destination. The first time I had this experience was when I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez before boarding a flight from Gangtok to Mumbai. I think I was lost in a fever dream state of mind because I finished 75% of that pretty chunky novel in 3 hours and my mother had to shake me out of my thoughts when we landed. I keep trying to recreate that feeling of being lost in a book.
While leaving for a two-day weekend getaway/staycation in Nashik I decided to drop my current read and pick up an easy to get into thriller instead. I was too busy being a potato and taking advantage of the cosy hotel beds to actually start reading the book so I finally got past the 10-page mark while on our drive back. The one thing I will give this book is that it was fast-paced enough to keep me occupied for 3 and a half hours. But that’s about it.
Domestic thrillers are not my cup of tea and I wouldn’t go as far as to call this a mystery, even though GoodReads classifies it as one. The Last Thing He Told Me follows a woman called Hannah Hall, whose husband leaves her a note with the words ‘Protect her’ before disappearing on the same day that the SEC raids his office and arrests his boss. The ‘her’ in the note refers to Hannah’s stepdaughter, Bailey, a sixteen-year-old who does not like the inclusion of a new member in their little family. Hannah and Bailey start putting the puzzle pieces together to figure out the reason behind Owen’s, the most important man in both their lives, disappearance but every answer uncovers even more questions before Hannah realises that the truth may be much darker than she had expected.
Like most thriller authors, Dave attempts to withhold key information about the mystery till the very last moment. But the set-up of the characters and their interactions give up too much right from the beginning. Within the first few chapters, I knew where the story was headed. Granted, I didn’t know the particulars but it is very easy to piece together the fact that Owen and Bailey’s past is foggy at best. Each plot twist was pretty predictable and that generally is my biggest complaint about domestic thrillers. They follow a pattern that is so ingrained into the genre itself that if you have read one you can figure out where all the others are headed.
Secondly, there were a lot of plot holes in this book. I am going to point out a few of them because I am just that annoyed with them. If I was a 38-year old marrying a man I knew for a little over a year I would try to know more about him than our gullible main character knows going in. In her defence, everything that her husband told her was a lie but when the hints that something is amiss are so clear she really would have to be an ostrich with her head buried in the sand to not notice them. The book is written in a mostly linear format with a few flashback chapters that tell the story of the time before Owen disappeared. There are more than enough instances in those flashback scenes that should have sparked Hannah’s curiosity. Why didn’t she poke Owen to tell her more about his mysterious trip to New Mexico? Why didn’t Hannah want to see pictures of Owen from college or high school? Why didn’t she follow the lead about the school he supposedly didn’t attend? For God’s sake, she didn’t even follow that lead when she was actively looking for the real Owen. Who was the woman in the photo that was supposedly Bailey’s mother? And why wasn’t Hannah curious when there were practically no photos of her pregnant or with baby Bailey?
It felt like in Dave’s attempts to set the plot points in place for the twists to be believable she set several opportunities in place that she then does not explore. Instead, she introduces very convenient characters (like Professor Cookman) or props (like the old and new wills) that come out of the blue and solve Hannah and Bailey’s questions. Even US Marshall Grady Bradford seems like a convenient prop in the story. We are told that Hannah does not trust him and Owen does not trust him and Bailey does not trust him but the reason behind this feels flimsy at best. There are also so many plot holes when it came to Owen’s involvement in Nicholas Bells’ business that it plain annoyed me and I could not believe it when Nicholas decides to spare Hannah and Bailey but not Owen. I get revenge for putting him in jail but what did Owen do that was so bad that Hannah would hate him if she knew about it? These are details that should have been clarified. Also, how does Google search work in this world? Searching the name Charlie Smith with enough of the information that Hannah had dug up should have lead to the story about Charlie’s father much sooner than it did.
Having said that, the book was not all bad. I liked the writing style and the pacing. I liked the characters, even Owen who was barely present throughout the story and yet such an integral part of the entire thing. The end was not my favourite but that is because I prefer ends where all the loose threads are tied up and in this one, Dave leaves one pretty major thread loose. But as far as ambiguous ends go this one was a pretty good one. I really appreciated the way Dave handled the relationship between Bailey and Hannah, especially the latter’s approach to suddenly being in charge of a teen who was not her daughter. The conversation around ‘choice’ was well done.
All in all, it was not a repeat of my fever dream experience but I had fun reading this book. I would, however, want to sit with the author and brush out these details. Or at least I wish they brush it out before turning it into a TV series starring Julia Roberts, which by the way I think is a brilliant idea. I just hope they cast someone really good as Owen Michaels because I have developed quite a soft spot for the character even though the end of his storyline is highly unsatisfactory. I will definitely binge the show as soon as it is out and I hope they do a better job of filling the plot holes and do not try to add unnecessary second and third seasons as they did with Big Little Lies.