The author of the fantastic Wrong Place, Wrong Time is back with a smart, twisty mystery that's wonderfully heavy on character development and a story that hooked me.
Famous Last Words is another smart, twisty mystery from Gillian McAllister.
Camilla is a new mother who has just dropped off her baby for her first day of daycare when the police arrive at her London office. It seems that her fun, carefree ghostwriter of a husband is involved in a hostage situation--as the one wielding the gun.
Camilla, shocked, mostly cooperates with the police and the negotiator--until the hostages are shot and her husband escapes--then disappears. But in the ensuing years, Camilla can't stop obsessing over the unusual aspects of the siege: the violence is so out of character for Luke, the hostages are never identified, and Luke was behaving strangely beforehand and left her a cryptic note the morning of the horrifying events. Are the strange coordinates she's receiving on her phone after seven years a message from Luke? And if they are and could lead her to Luke, would her love possibly overcome her devastation at knowing that somehow her beloved partner became a coldhearted killer?
Niall, the single-minded, lovable oaf of a hostage negotiator reels after the siege. While Camilla struggles to manage her single-parenting life and career after the tragedy, Luke's disappearance, and the surrounding scandal that pushes its ugly fingers into any peace she finds, we track Niall's life as his obsession with work upends his marriage, then as his failure in bringing out Luke and the hostages unharmed during the siege destroys his career. On separate but essential tracks, Niall and Camilla begin to piece together the truth of what happened that long-ago day in June--and then to work together.
McAllister's Wrong Place, Wrong Time relied on an intriguing time-travel element as its twist. I thought that element would crop up and be in play here too, and I set myself on some early and wild mental goose chases trying to figure out how. But Famous Last Words doesn't use--or require--that structure; the twist is largely internal. Does Camilla believe in the Luke she knew? Does she trust that what doesn't add up could shape a new narrative around the events of that fateful day, one in which things aren't at all what they appeared to be?
I loved this smart mystery that relies heavily on character development and mental agility for our narrator. I saw some plot points coming but not others, and a couple of essential details worked quite conveniently, but I didn't mind. The ending offers answers and resolution. Sign me up for all the Gillian McAllister books, please.
Camilla is a literary agent, and I loved her escapes into books and her love for them.
I listened to an audiobook edition of Famous Last Words courtesy of HarperAudio and Libro.fm.
More Gillian McAllister love
Gillian McAllister is also the author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time, a book I loved and not only listed in my Greedy Reading List Six More Time-Travel Stories to Explore, but included as one of my favorite books of the year when I read it.
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