Book review: Last Seen Alive

I received a digital ARC of this book from Michael Joseph (Penguin) via NetGalley in return for an unbiased review.

This is the second novel by Claire Douglas I’ve read, and her third published. It required proper concentration, especially in the later parts of the story, which I was happy to give. I recognised the effort put in to planning the work and enjoyed it all the more for it. To inhabit the world of Libby for a few days was at first a welcome distraction from the world, then a nightmare. It was scary, prescient, real. The plotting was masterful, the characters nicely drawn. At first one or two felt like caricatures but their motivation was revealed later. Claire Douglas knows how to do twists well, and she deploys them again and again as soon as the reader is settled from the previous one. I raced through the second half of the book in a night because I needed to know what happens! A page-turner for sure where even the clean-cut and the goody two-shoes have dark secrets. Where just a name that once comforted can chill. The first-person narrative Douglas deployed so well in Local Girl Missing is what lets us sink so seemingly effortlessly in to the personas she creates. Here we have the added bonus of getting inside a second character’s head later on in the novel. 5*/5*

Last Seen Alive by Claire Douglas is published on 13th July 2017 by Michael Joseph and is available from Amazon, Waterstones and probably your local independent bookseller.