Author: Laura Dave · Published: 2021 · Genre: Mystery, Domestic Suspense
The Last Thing He Told Me‘s biggest strength is the relationship between a woman and the teenage stepdaughter who doesn’t like her, which gives the mystery real emotional weight. Its weakness is that, as a thriller, it is thin: the investigation runs on lucky hunches and the tension stays low. Read it if you want a quick, moving book-club mystery rather than a twist-a-minute page-turner.
What it’s about
Hannah Hall, a woodturner who left New York for Sausalito, California, to marry Owen, is still settling into her new life when it falls apart. A girl turns up at her door with a note from Owen bearing two words: protect her. Owen has vanished. At the same moment, the tech company he works for, The Shop, is at the centre of a fraud investigation, and its chief executive is arrested.
The “her” is Bailey, Owen’s 16-year-old daughter, who has never warmed to Hannah. Owen has also left Bailey a bag stuffed with cash. As federal agents and reporters come calling, Hannah realises she can’t fully trust the authorities, and that there is a great deal she never knew about her husband. She and Bailey set out to find the truth for themselves. The present-day search is interspersed with Hannah’s memories of how she and Owen fell in love.
That’s all the setup you need. Everything else is best left for the book to reveal.
What’s great
- Hannah and Bailey. The stepmother-stepdaughter relationship, prickly at first and slowly built on shared fear and loss, is the heart of the book, and Dave handles it with real tenderness. Bailey in particular feels like a believable, angry, frightened teenager.
- The question of trust. The novel’s sharpest idea is that love can coexist with not really knowing someone. Hannah’s insistence that Owen’s love was real, even as she learns how much he kept from her, gives the book an emotional question beyond the mystery itself.
- Readability. Short chapters, clean prose and a premise that hooks you on the first page. It is easy to finish in a sitting or two.
- Hannah’s craft. Her woodturning is more than decoration. The patience and attention to detail of her work shape how she approaches the search.
What’s weak
The suspense is mild. Hannah cracks much of the mystery through leaps of intuition and conveniently recalled memories rather than real investigation, and several reviewers have complained that the plot relies too heavily on her powers of deduction. The middle slows down, with long reflective passages that will frustrate readers who came for momentum.
The corporate fraud plot is sketched rather than explored, and the danger never feels quite as urgent as the opening promises. Owen himself, seen mostly through Hannah’s memories, stays something of a cipher. Readers expecting a breathless thriller should know this is a character story first and a mystery second.
None of that stopped its success. It was Reese Witherspoon’s book club pick for May 2021 and became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Apple TV+ adapted it as a series in 2023, starring Jennifer Garner as Hannah, and Dave published a sequel, The First Time I Saw Him, in January 2026.
Who should read it
Book clubs, readers of domestic fiction who enjoy a mystery thread, and anyone who liked the Apple TV+ series and wants the original. Seasoned thriller readers will probably find it too gentle.
Rating: 3/5
Image credits — Featured image: cover image via Open Library; cover design © the publisher, shown for review purposes. In-article images: Image by Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
