Thursday, January 2, 2025

Book Review: The Last Broken Girl

By Sara Steven

Erin Moore, kidnapped as a teenager and held for months, learns her abductor is up for parole. The police always believed her captor acted alone, and that the female accomplice Erin described years ago was the fabrication of a traumatized mind.

Twenty years later, Erin leads a rigidly structured life with her husband and two young daughters and has a successful psychology practice in the same small midwestern town. When her abductor is paroled early and goes missing, leaving behind a large pool of blood, Erin and her husband become suspects. Erin receives threatening notes she is certain came from the accomplice, but she is unable to convince the police the menace is real.

As Erin watches her life unravel, including her marriage, career and possibly her sanity, she knows the only way out is to bring the accomplice to justice, even if it’s twenty years late. (Synopsis courtesy of Goodreads.)

The Last Broken Girl was incredibly suspenseful and flat out engaging. Erin’s experiences instantly draw the reader in, with the primary focus highlighting what happens after her former captor is up for parole. Erin has spent the majority of her adulthood doing everything she can to create a safe environment for her children and her husband, with private gated fences and living practically out of civilization, minimizing her social media exposure and making it near impossible for anyone to know where she is and if she even exists.

But someone knows. Every year on her birthday, she receives a postcard. And since the parole, the threats and phantom sightings have increased, and Erin isn’t sure if it’s merely a trick of the mind and the stress of the past coming back to haunt her, or if there really is an impending threat to her safety. When it extends to her family, she knows she has no choice but to do what should have been done a long time ago: seek out her former captor, find the accomplice, and put a stop to it all, once and for all. 

It’s hard to do when no one believes her, or if they do, they think her memory is skewed and she’s reinventing the past. The people she’s always relied on fall away, mostly due to their own skeletons in the closet, and Erin doesn’t know any other way than to go at it alone. It felt justified, considering all that had been done to her. In the latter part of the book, it felt like Erin’s last stand, and I was there for it, all the way. There’s something to be said when it comes to witnessing a vulnerable, broken person pulling themselves up to do what must be done in order to save those she loves and in many ways, save herself from what haunts her, and the author did an excellent job of showcasing that. 

As the story moved along, the pace was pretty perfect, with constant suspense and intrigue. What’s real and what isn’t? And who really is the culprit? The Last Broken Girl is a definite five-star thriller, hands down! 

Thanks to Cynthia Rice for the book in exchange for an honest review.

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