Hey, it’s Diego.

With the holidays out of the way, I’m back to reading. I just finished reading Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister.

And it’s about a woman looking for answers.

So, here is a list of my top reads of this trope.

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Top Looking For Answers Thrillers

She Didn’t See it Coming by Shari Lapena

She Didn’t See it Coming by Shari Lapena follows a family and the detective assigned to the case as they look for answers in the aftermath of a woman’s disappearance.

Sam receives a call at his office. Bryden, her wife, working from home that day, has failed to collect their daughter from daycare. Arriving home with their little girl, he finds his wife’s car in the underground garage. Upstairs in their apartment, her laptop is open on the table, her cell phone nearby, her keys in their usual place in the hall. Except Bryden is nowhere to be seen. It’s as if she just walked out.

Eight Years of Lies by Lisa Hall

In Eight Years of Lies by Lisa Hall, we follow Claire, who is looking forward to a normal day. Her husband, Tom, is out the door to take their daughter to school when she sees a Facebook post from a stranger claiming her husband and daughter are missing. But the picture on the screen is of Tom and her daughter. She tries to put it out of her mind, but when Tom doesn’t show up that night, or the following night, she knows something terrible has happened.

The Night of the Crash by Jessica Irena Smith

The Night of the Crash by Jessica Irena Smith introduces us to Steppy, a true-crime podcaster who wakes up in hospital. She’s lost her memory of the last few weeks following a car accident. The night of the accident, her mother was brutally murdered, and her own brother is the main suspect. She now has to piece back why she was even in town when she’s not close to her family and why she was investigating the ongoing case of a missing girl.

And the newest addition to the list:

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

Camilla is due to get back to work after months of maternity leave. When she wakes up that day, though, her husband Luke isn’t there, only a cryptic note. She goes through the motions of dropping her infant daughter at daycare and driving to work, but she can’t shake this feeling that something isn’t right. Then it starts. Breaking news: there’s a hostage situation developing, and her husband is the gunman.

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister is a domestic thriller set mostly in a family home.

McAllister’s writing is all over the place. The first quarter of the book is riddled with similes that take you out of the experience (the rain droplets were like bombs, her smile was like a slice of lemon, etc). The good news is that it stops after a while (maybe the editor got bored?). Then she has an annoying way of ending most of the earlier chapters. She will end each one with some sort of spoiler/cliffhanger to try to keep you reading (She thought that things couldn’t get worse. But soon she would discover that they would, because her husband was about to show up with a gun - a made-up example, but you get the point). This is also dropped about halfway through the book, which I greatly appreciated.

The story starts on the day of the siege, which was great. But then, after a couple of chapters, things start sagging, and they continue like this for most of the book. It didn’t help that Camilla takes longer to figure things out than the reader. All in all, it was a slow read.

We follow Camilla in a single timeline as the story develops. And although she wants to figure things out, most of the time she figures things out by accident, and spends most of the book doing banal things. Camilla is mostly a passive character in this regard. The book is then saved by the secondary character Neil, the hostage negotiator, who is a proactive character who moves the plot along.

I liked that there was tension throughout the story, at least. And the psychological state of Camilla is something that we spend a lot of time with, which I could relate as she was both a wife and a mother and had to make the best out of a terrible situation.

There is no romance, some swearing, and no scenes of graphic violence.

So, what about the ending? (No spoilers, obviously)

The ending worked well. Good enough for me to classify it as a good book.

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister is an entertaining read. It’s rare that we dive into the psychological aspect of such a dramatised event off the bat. If you are into a book that starts with a bang and then slows down to delve into the psychological aspect and looking for answers, then this is a book for you.

This Week’s Update

• December was a great month for thriller releases on the big screen with The Housemaid and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

• I discovered this week, and think it’s hilarious, that The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine is getting a Netflix adaptation, given that The Housemaid is always said to be heavily based on it. It’s going to be interesting to see how it’s received once it releases.

That’s all for this week. See you next time.

— Diego Dunne

P.S. Let me know how I did today by replying to this email.

P.P.S. I would love to hear your recommendations for thrillers you loved. Reply to this email, and I’ll add them to my TBR list. Thanks!