The Last Word

Do you think about your book reviews before you post them? For Emma Carpenter, one negative book review makes her question everything about the author, H. G. Kane.

Alone and isolated while house-sitting on the coast of Washington, Emma goes through a few books a day. When her neighbor recommends a terribly written book as a joke, Emma decides to leave a 1-star review after wasting four hours of her life. When the author responds, it seems that he is taking the review extremely seriously. Shortly after, weird things start happening at night, and Emma thinks the disgruntled author is involved.

After digging into Kane’s work, Emma realizes that there are sixteen other gruesome and horrific tales of murder. Are these books purely fiction? Or is Emma about to find out how seriously the author takes his writing.

Taylor Adams does a phenomenal job of using classic horror tropes to poke fun at the way some authors write. This book was a blast to read and starts out with the action right from the beginning. The story was meta and fun and more complex than your average thriller. There is a narrator within a narrator, a writing style that has the potential to be confusing but really worked. This is the ultimate unreliable narrator story, especially because you don’t know who the narrator is half the time.

This is another fast-paced, action packed thriller with fantastic writing and a badass final girl. You can’t count anyone out, and even when you think you know where the story is going, Adams throws in one more twist. I recommend this book to people who love a terrifying thriller with humor sprinkled in to cut the tension.

Thank you to William Morrow and Taylor Adams for my ARC of this book. Opinions are my own. The Last Word comes out on April 25, 2023