The Last Truths We Told: 'Seriously good' Sarah Vaughan

I am rating this as 3 stars because although it kept my attention and interest like any good murder mystery should, I found it a bit confusing and ultimately disappointing. The last one third or quarter did not live up to the promising start. Maybe I let myself get too invested in 'whodunnit' and I'm dissatisfied because I'm still a little unsure about what actually happened. It was a rushed reveal, and it felt like all the threads of the story didn't tie up neatly.

A group of nine friends are at University together and spend an evening writing predictions about what they think each of the others will be doing in twenty years time. These predictions are written in secret and entrusted to the most sensible of the group for safekeeping. Twenty years down the line the book opens at the start of a weekend houseparty hosted by one of the group at which their predictions are revealed..

There is a lot to like about this book. The premise is unique and it is an ingenious way of telling the back stories of the characters involved - on the whole this is largely successful. The reactions of the group o the predictions made twenty years before are entirely plausible, often evoking strong emotions and revealing a lot about what other people really thought of them back in the day. There is also suspense, which mounts as recent events resolve themselves into a mystery which Maggie, the principle narrator is determined to solve.

However, disappointingly it did not live up to my expectations. The reason that I said that the premise was “largely successful” as a means of telling a story is that for some reason it didn’t quite work for me and I’m not entirely sure why. It was both clever and creative but the end result was bitty, everything being revealed in bite-sized chunks. Another issue I had was that I could not get a clear picture in my head of each of the nine characters. As this is a much smaller cast list than most books have to deal with, I would have expected to get to know each character intimately but, by the end, I was still having trouble differentiating some from the others and remembering details about their jobs etc. Finally, there were patches in the middle where I was beginning to get bored and the narrative seemed dull but the pace did pick up again towards the end.

Whilst I cannot bring myself to wholly recommend this book (for the reasons given above), there is no doubt that it is an original premise which deserved to be better.

Such a great premise for a book. I enjoyed the first few chapters, however my enjoyment quickly began to wane. The characters failed to engage and the plot became ever more forced, with Maggie and Jude dashing about hither and thither trying to establish their suspicions of wrongdoing, in between rounds of the ever present parlour game. The last quarter of the book was a real slog to finish.