Review: HER LAST WORDS, E.V. Kelly

• 
  this edition first published by Quercus UK 2022
• ISBN 978-1-52941-717-3
  
• 386 pages

Synopsis (publisher) 

THE DEAD WON’T STAY SILENT FOREVER…

It’s a crisp spring morning when Cass drops her husband, a respected lecturer, to the beach for his medically prescribed swim. While waiting for him, something catches her eye. A young woman runs towards her husband and embraces him – until he holds his hand over her face and she falls down on the stones, dead.

In the backseat of the car, their seven-year-old son sits quietly. When her husband returns, he says nothing. Neither does Cass. Afraid to speak up in the immediate aftermath, Cass embarks on a solitary quest to unravel what has taken place.

Cass is quickly drawn into a web of lies that pulls her back to the previous autumn, when a beautiful Italian postgraduate student finds herself subsumed by an inescapable desire. It’s visceral. It’s destiny. But sometimes destiny can kill…

Atmospheric, twisty, and propulsive, Her Last Words is an edge-of-your-seat read about obsession and dark secrets coming to light.

My Take

A young Irish wife watches her husband apparently murder a young woman on the beach in front of her. But when he gets in the car he makes no comment about it and she is not sure exactly what she has witnessed.

As the morning progresses the death is reported on the television news and Cass is still not sure what she should do.

The novel uses two time frames which seem to work independently of each other, one in fact considerably ahead of the other. The reader's job is to jigsaw them together which is at time s very challenging. I found the eventual result quite unexpected although there were early hints.

My rating: 4.7

About the author
E. V. Kelly holds a PhD in sociology from UCD. Her short stories have been broadcast on RTÉ and published in Crannóg, while her winning stories have appeared in The Irish Times, an anthology and online. She has been shortlisted for various awards including the Francis MacManus Short Story Award, the Hennessy Literary Awards and the SBP/Penguin Ireland Award. She was nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2021. Her Last Words is her first novel.