Review: "The Last Thing She Saw" by Nina Laurin

The Last Thing She Saw by Nina Laurin
Published July 2024 via Grand Central Publishing
★★★

A failed podcaster returns to her tired hometown when a flood unearths remains—remains that can only be the body of the girl whose disappearance said podcaster once tried to investigate.

Sometimes you just need a random murder mystery. I like stories about cold cases—both fiction and nonfiction—though I'm never quite sure why. This one gives us both the then and the now; as well as Stephanie poking around and trying to figure out what happened back in the day, we see her mother as a teenager in the same small town, before...well, before everything.

I was here for the premise but found the story itself to be quite slow. It doesn't help that the characters aren't particularly likeable, and neither do they try to be; Stephanie's mother, Laura, is in the Then sections maybe the most compelling character (trying to escape the fate of her own mother, among other things), but since we first see her Now, it's hard to root for her all that much for most of the book. That's okay—not all books have to be driven by likeable characters—but when the plot is slow and the mystery not as compelling as I'd hoped, this all added up to a pretty unmemorable read.