Here are 58 books that The Last Word fans have personally recommended if you like
The Last Word.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Growing up in theatre, I was completely immersed in plays, which tend to be deep dives of the human psyche, and I latched on to those examinations like a dog with a bone. I’ve always loved the complexities of the human mind, specifically how we so desperately want to believe that anything beautiful, expensive, or exclusive must mean that the person, place, or thing is of more value. But if we pull back the curtain, and really take a raw look, we see that nothing is exempt from smudges of ugliness. It’s the ugliness, especially in regard to human character, that I find most fascinating.
I started acting on stage at age five and have continued working in theater since, ultimately becoming a playwright. So, the theatre kid in me ate this book up! Much like The Secret History, the setting of If We Were Villians absolutely sucked me in and did not once let me go. I found it a perfect example of beautiful young adults living a dreamlike experience at school, all the while being horrible human beings.
It was the first book in years that I found myself making excuses to go hide in isolation so I could continue reading. In my opinion, M.L. Rio did a spectacular job of making extremely oddball characters, who speak in Shakespearian clips and have blinding tunnel vision view of their art, into people who seemed eerily real. This book is definitely going in my “to be read again” pile.
Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends - a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened ten years ago. As a young actor studying Shakespeare at an elite arts conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same roles onstage and off - villain, hero, tyrant, temptress - though Oliver felt doomed to always be a secondary…
Cleo Cooper is living the dream with ocean-dipping weekends, a good job, good friends, fair boyfriend, and a good dog. But, paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay.
I love everything Liane Moriarty writes. This one was wonderful. A wife's marriage is destroyed by her best friend, a woman's family is destroyed by a husband's secret, a mother's life is destroyed by her daughter's death. Ethical questions abound, and you feel yourself trapped in decisions you might have made yourself. Fully fleshed, believable characters, each dealing with angst and moral dilemmas. I couldn't fathom how the book would end, and the ending was perfect. An epilogue gives an even more satisfying conclusion. Great book.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE—THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF BIG LITTLE LIES AND APPLES NEVER FALL
One of the Best Books of the Year—Entertainment Weekly One of the Top Ten Books of the Year—People
At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read…
My darling Cecilia, If you’re reading this, then I’ve died…
Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not only the life you…
A new mystery is afoot in the fourth book in the Thursday Murder Club series from million-copy bestselling author Richard Osman
You'd think you be allowed to relax over Christmas, but not in the world of the Thursday Murder Club.
On Boxing Day, a dangerous package is smuggled across the English coast. When it goes missing, chaos is unleashed. The body count starts to rise – including someone close to the Thursday Murder Club--as our gang face an impossible search, and their most deadly opponents yet.
With the clock ticking down and a killer heading to Cooper’s Chase, has their…
Cleo Cooper is living the dream with ocean-dipping weekends, a good job, good friends, fair boyfriend, and a good dog. But, paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay.
Review: My goodness! This is a trip & half story. Edith Holler is a 12 year old aspiring playwright. Her father has told her the playhouse will fall if she tries to leave the building. Then her father remarries a horrible woman with her swarm of beetles to infest the city. She makes a local delicacy called Beetle Spread. But what *else* is in your tea cakes? Could it be Soylent Children? Or you all be just another ghost haunting the theater? 60
l've no idea how this book hasn't reached the audience, like EVERYBODY, it deserves.
The witty and entrancing story of a young woman trapped in a ramshackle English playhouse—and the mysterious figure who threatens the theater's very survival
The year is 1901. England’s beloved queen has died, and her aging son has finally taken the throne. In the eastern city of Norwich, bright and inquisitive young Edith Holler spends her days among the boisterous denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave its confines. Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from…
Elly Griffith's characters sparkle with originality in The Crossing Places, as does her setting and plot. A light read, this mystery nonetheless drew me in, surprising me with twists and turns, making the most of archaeologist Ruth Galloway's curiosity and DCI Nelson's unswerving dedication. The two uncover mysteries in the marshes and bogs near a remote beach, a fitting setting for ancient burial practices. I'd choose a second one in this series!
Discover the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries, one of the most popular crime series in Britain, with this beautiful special edition.
START THE JOURNEY HERE AND YOU WILL BE HOOKED
Dr Ruth Galloway is called in when a child's bones are discovered near the site of a prehistoric henge on the north Norfolk salt marshes. Are they the remains of a local girl who disappeared ten years earlier - or are the bones much older?
DCI Harry Nelson refuses to give up the hunt for the missing girl. Since she vanished, someone has been sending him bizarre anonymous notes about ritual…
My attention was taken by a mystery set in a school close to the town I lived in before I married. Given that I had already enjoyed books from Elly's Ruth Galloway series, I was soon engrossed in this novel, apparently the first in a new series.
With links to the writings of an author who had once lived at the school and suggestions of paranormal activity, I found the story captivating and, indeed, quite scary at times. I was glad that, when revealed, the perpetrator of the crimes, however, was not from the spectrum of ghosts and ghoulies but a person with a motive very much set in the real world.
THE TIMES CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR. THE RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK.
'Utterly bewitching ... a pitch-perfect modern Gothic' AJ FINN, author of THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW
A dark story has been brought to terrifying life. Can the ending be rewritten in time?
This is what the police know: English teacher Clare Cassidy's friend Ella has just been murdered. Clare and Ella had recently fallen out. Found beside the body was a line from The Stranger, a story by the Gothic writer Clare teaches, and the murder scene is identical to one of the deaths in the…
I grew up reading Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and everything British. My first novel celebrated American literature and small towns, and my first murder mystery was a love letter to England. I once spent twenty days visiting almost thirty bookshops and reading my way all over England, and let me tell you, I learned a thing or two about murders.
Harbinder Kaur, the lead detective in Elly Griffiths's charming series, describes herself as “the best gay sikh detective in West Sussex,” and together with a few amateur sleuths, she forms a delightful cast in a sort of modern-day Miss Marple-romp.
It begins with an old lady using her binoculars to take careful note of what’s happening in her sleepy seaside village, and as all fans of British cozy crime know, where there are nosy neighbors, dead bodies will soon turn up. I loved Elly Griffiths's series about archeologist Ruth Galloway, and this new series does not disappoint. In fact, Elly Griffiths herself makes a small and entirely involuntary cameo in my book.
The ultimate gripping murder mystery to curl up with, from the bestselling author of The Stranger Diaries and the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries
The death of a ninety-year-old woman with a heart condition should absolutely not be suspicious. DS Harbinder Kaur certainly sees nothing to concern her in carer Natalka's account of Peggy Smith's death.
But when Natalka reveals that Peggy lied about her heart condition and that she had been sure someone was following her...
And that Peggy Smith had been a 'murder consultant'…
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
A New York Times bestseller | Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment
"Witty, endearing and greatly entertaining." -Wall Street Journal
"Don't trust anyone, including the four septuagenarian sleuths in Osman's own laugh-out-loud whodunit." -Parade
Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves A female cop with her first big case A brutal murder Welcome to... THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.
I’m Julia Buckley, a passionate lifelong reader, English teacher, and mystery writer. I gravitated toward mystery as a child when my mom read all the greats of 20th Century Mystery and Romantic Suspense and then passed them on to me. When I became an English teacher, I had the privilege of teaching some of the great Gothic classics like Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and The Castle of Otranto. Teaching these great works and researching the way that all Gothic literature stemmed from Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, I realized that MANY of the books I read are tinged with the Gothic.
No one writes suspense like Ruth Ware! Her books are all compelling page-turners, and yes, she follows my magic formula. All of her heroines are young women who go from a stable existence to some sort of fish-out-of-water situation that creates suspense. In this book, the young narrator, down on her luck, decides to respond to a letter claiming she is an heiress. While she knows that the letter has been sent to her because she bears the same name as the real heiress, she decides to claim the family fortune, or whatever she can get, and then run away.
But when she is introduced to the mysterious family members and finds that there are skeletons in the ancestral closet, she starts to feel trapped. At this point, I am nestling in with the popcorn and Diet Coke because this is the evening’s entertainment. I love the way Ware pushes…
'I read this in two lightning-quick sittings...I absolutely adored it' Lisa Jewell, bestselling author of The Family Upstairs
HAL MUST KEEP GOING OR RISK LOSING EVERYTHING...EVEN HER LIFE.
When Harriet Westaway receives an unexpected letter telling her she's inherited a substantial bequest from her Cornish grandmother, it seems like the answer to her prayers.
There's just one problem - Hal's real grandparents died more than twenty years ago.
Hal desperately needs the cash and makes a choice that will change her life for ever. She knows that her skills as a seaside fortune teller could help her con her way…
