Famous Last Words

by Gillian McAllister ★★★★☆

It's the morning of Camilla "Cam" Deschamps' first day back at work, nine months after giving birth to her daughter Polly. As she's preparing for the day, she can't help but be perturbed, because for some reason her husband Luke is gone. Certainly he didn't forget that today was her return to the office...right? As her frustration begins to grow, she eventually finds a note on the hallway table:

"If anything is written on one side. Huh? If anything? And crossed out? Cam holds the piece of paper up to the light. She turns it over. It's been so lovely with you both. Lx.

Maybe the If anything is old. The main note is this one, surely? An end-of-maternity-leave note. It's been so lovely. A kind of 'good luck'?"

Cam makes her way to daycare where she drops Polly before heading in to her office. Before long, she notices a breaking news story on the television. "A man has taken three hostages in a warehouse in London...Authorities are present at the scene and believe it to be a hostile act." That's when the police show up, asking for Cam.

She has found her husband, and he's not one of the hostages; he's the one holding the gun.

No one thinks their spouse would be capable of something like this, but it is clearly Luke in the CCTV footage of the warehouse. There must be an explanation, and Cam is determined to get to the bottom of how her husband could ever find himself in such a situation, while also realizing she must find ways to help protect him from a horde of police determined to move in with force. Two of the three hostages still have yet to be identified, and that has raised the hostage negotiator's suspicions as well. "It's making me wonder," he says. "If all is not as it seems."

I became a fan of Gillian McAllister when her uniquely-premised novel Wrong Place, Wrong Time finished just outside my Top 10 books of 2023. In that novel, our protagonist moved backward in time, collecting clues over the course of a day, before waking up days, weeks, or even months prior to the previous day. The plot of Famous Last Words is less aspirational, and the particulars of the mystery less finely hewn, but the character development is once again better than average, especially for books in the mystery/thriller genre. While Cam is the most fully rendered, McAllister also takes the time to build depth into Cam's sister Libby and their relationship—a brutally honest, heart-laid-bare conversation the two have at a restaurant is among the most well-written scenes in the novel. McAllister also adds nuance to the hostage negotiator, Niall, who battles his own demons, and who Cam must decide if she can trust to extract her husband without harm.

The novel takes some interesting turns, and while I guessed at least one of the significant twists, those zigs when the reader is expecting a zag are fair. It was entertaining, and while it didn't quite live up to the high bar set by Wrong Place, Wrong Time, my biggest challenge was probably that I came in with inflated expectations. This should please most readers.