This is my second novel from the pen of Megan Miranda and both are consistently good thrillers. “The Last To Vanish” was an immersive and creepy thriller albeit a slow-paced one.

The protagonist, Abby Lovett has spent the last decade of her life at the Passage Inn in Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina. She first came to the town at the age of eighteen shortly after her mother’s death. The Passage Inn and its owner Celeste Farley give Abby the support and succor that she needs and is now a place she thinks of as ‘home’. Celeste has proved to be a mentor and a mother-figure.

Cutter’s Pass is a town adjacent to the Appalachian Trail – a town that has many secrets which it staunchly guards. It is a town with a reputation for being dangerous due to the fact that six visitors have disappeared from there in the last quarter century. Now… it proves dangerous to Abby too when she seeks to uncover the secrets it hides.

“I had started to feel trapped. That this place was a prison, instead of a sanctuary.”

The town and the myriad secrets it holds held my interest and I was compelled to keep reading to discover who was responsible for the many disappearances over the years. The plot slowly divulged its own secrets and did so with a foreboding sense of menace.

The title “The Last To Vanish” was perfect for the book and fit well with the plot. If I told you how I’d have to kill you. LOL

The themes of this novel were the weight of obligations, guilt, secrets, loyalty, the benefits of ‘found families’, and the vagaries of fate.  A worthy suspense thriller that I can recommend to fans of the genre.

This review was written voluntarily and my rating was in no way influenced by the fact that I received a complimentary digital copy of this novel from Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books – Simon and Schuster
ISBN:9781982147310 — ASIN: B09JPKYJZH— 336 pages

Publication date: July 26, 2022

Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of Such a Quiet Place, All the Missing Girls, The Perfect Stranger, The Last House Guest, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, and The Girl from Widow Hills. She has also written several books for young adults, including Come Find Me, Fragments of the Lost, and The Safest Lies. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children.

Connect with Megan Miranda via her website, Twitter, and/or Instagram.