Book Description Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month: Romance“[A] gripping novel of suspense from Elliot (A Merciful Secret)…Elliot skillfully unravels layers of intersecting stories, each one integral to the overall story of the Mills family and their small-town secrets. Readers will want to see more from this author.” —Publishers Weekly“Elliot succeeds in creating both a thrilling mystery and a fascinating character study of the people inhabiting these pages.” —Bookreporter“With her riveting, narrative driven, deftly crafted storytelling style as a novelist, Kendra Elliot’s The Last Sister will prove to be a welcome and enduringly popular addition to community library Mystery/Suspense/Thriller collections.” —Midwest Book Review“Suspense on top of suspense. This one will keep you guessing until the final page and shows Elliot at her very best.” —The Real Book Spy“Every family has skeletons. Kendra Elliot’s tale of the Mills family’s dark secrets is first-rate suspense. Dark and gripping, The Last Sister crescendos to knock-out, edge-of-your seat tension.” —Robert Dugoni, bestselling author of My Sister’s Grave“The Last Sister is exciting and suspenseful! Engaging characters and a complex plot kept me on the edge of my seat until the very last page.” —T.R. Ragan, bestselling author of the Jessie Cole series Read more About the Author Kendra Elliot has landed on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list multiple times and is the award-winning author of the Bone Secrets and Callahan & McLane series, as well as the Mercy Kilpatrick novels. Kendra is a three-time winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award, an International Thriller Writers Award finalist, and an RT Award finalist. She has always been a voracious reader, cutting her teeth on classic female heroines such as Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Laura Ingalls. She was born, raised, and still lives in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her family, but she looks forward to the day she can live in flip-flops. Visit her at www.kendraelliot.com. Read more Customers Review: I just finished The Last Sister and was disappointed. Ms Elliott is an amazing author but this one didn’t work for me on multiple levels. I truly appreciated the societal context which is entirely relevant in this day and age, so that’s a plus. I loved Zander and all he represented. I was meh on Emily. I struggled with so many secrets kept for the sake of simply keeping them. Tara was the only character with a legitimate reason to keep her secret from the authorities, yet each sister, their aunts, and a host of others kept secrets in order to not rock the boat. And several chapters before the ending, things got pretty frenetic before coming to an abrupt end. The story was wrapped up nicely but there was a bit too much to it.This is a mystery with a romance brewing in the background and that’s totally fine but don’t go into this expecting a love story. And poor Ava…one of my favorite characters from this series…she’s had quite the 18-months. You go girl!From this book I immediately transitioned to re-reading Vanished to remind myself of why I love Ms Elliott’s work so much. It doesn’t disappoint even though I already know how the story plays out.
This book packs a punch!Threats, death attempts, hate crimes, racism, KKK ties, violence, mystery, suspense, and a flutter of light romance are all embedded in this new page-turning series by Elliot. It is gritty, has an emotional pull, and has a constant edge-of-your-seat feel from beginning to end. The storyline is engrossing and the characters are well-developed and likable (The aunts are great!). Elliot has a gift for weaving tragedy, malevolence, drama, family ties, and emotional conflict into a great mystery thriller that will leave you reeling and yet ready for the next book in the series.Emily and her sisters, Tara and Madison, suffered tragedy and loss in their childhood and the repercussions have carried over into their adult lives. One sister ran and has not been heard from since, one sister closed herself off and just tried to move on, and one sister is resentful and holds bitterness towards the others and the awful circumstances that separated them. Lies and secrets cloud their memories of the pivotal moments of their parents’ deaths and hold them all part. And when a new murder in their hometown mirrors their father’s and old evidence resurfaces their worlds come crashing down around them as terrible truths are revealed. Complications arise when the FBI joins the local police to solve the case, asking questions and revisiting the worst time of the sisters’ lives. When the present echoes the past, was the killer really found? Or are they still lurking in the shadows waiting to strike…to finally eliminate all those who possibly know the truth?*I received an arc through NetGalley, via the publisher, and I am voluntarily providing my honest review.
If you’re a Kendra Elliot follower, then you’ll really enjoy this well-developed novel with engaging characters set in a small town near the Columbia River’s outlet into the Pacific Ocean. If you read the author’s Widow’s Island novella series, written jointly with Melinda Leigh, then you’ll likely see several character and storyline similarities. However, this murder and police procedural has greater depth and plot development, marking it a more satisfying reading experience.The author’s plot focus on the family victims with strong storyline support from law-enforcement characters makes this novel more personal and relatable to readers. The quaint hometown interactions magnify the post-murder tensions and fears among the close knit community seeking answers.Adding to the novel’s suspense are several untimely deaths twenty years earlier that now must be re-examined from more recent similar tragedies. Just as you figure something out, the author turns everything upside down when darker motives are identified with potentially racial undertones. The community and families affected face a series of challenges and questions about missing people. Who can they trust?Although the story starts slowly and a bit predictably, the number of surprises and storyline pacing increase with each chapter, making it impossible to put down until the final chapter. Hold on!The two narrators in the Audible companion reader option made the story more engaging by adding appropriate character dialogue variations that leveraged the book’s inertia, making the reading experience even more enjoyable.The violence and sexual situations were minimized, making the story more appropriate to larger audiences, even though some might find the occasional cursing offensive but not overwhelmingly frequent.A generally good, fast read for a quick diversion!
I was dismayed with this book. It did not flow well, characters weak, had to make myself finish. Just ho hum.
What a twisted sister story! Three sister who all witness the murder of their father. Each one has a different memory of the night it happened and nobody tells the cops. Now it’s happening again but only two sisters are left to miss the victims. Only one sees the crime scene. Kendra is brilliant! |
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