Laura Dave's The Last Thing He Told Me starts fast, like “I can’t wait to watch this character’s life fall apart” fast. Readers plunge headfirst into the world of Hannah Hall, wife of missing man Owen Michaels, as he suddenly and inexplicably disappears when his boss is arrested for fraud and embezzlement. Owen leaves behind an ambiguous note for Hannah that ends with the words “Protect her”, referring to his 16-year-old daughter Bailey, Hannah’s stepdaughter. To provide some context, when Bailey was a child, Owen’s first wife/Bailey’s mother passed away in a tragic car accident. Owen uprooted their lives and moved to a floating home in Sausalito, California, where Hannah later joined them, assuming the role of the resented stepmother.

Nevertheless, the hunt for Owen begins. Instantly, we’re rooting for Owen and his safe return to his family. He appeared to be a solid guy; he was in love with Hannah and cared deeply about his daughter. Surely he was just a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hence, readers are itching to know more about Owen’s abrupt departure from his seemingly perfect life.  

Sadly, the novel’s intrigue is short-lived. Things took a noticeable detour as vague criminal activities and unrealistic details were introduced into the story. It began when Hannah and Bailey arrived in Austen, Texas, to investigate Owen’s newly discovered connection to the state. During this spontaneous trip, Hannah and Bailey form an unexpected alliance, hoping to learn more together about Owen’s previous life in Austen. They visit unusually welcoming churches that readily share private information with them, all Hannah needed to do was supply an inspirational monologue about family. After their long-winded efforts tracking down establishments that Bailey can very bizarrely recall from her early childhood, their meddling leads them to an all-important bar called “The Never Dry”, owned by Bailey’s mother’s family, and Owen’s former in-laws.

After a strained interaction at the bar, the internet (as usual) provides Hannah with all her answers. She discovers that Bailey’s mother, Owen’s first wife, Katherine Smith, was the daughter of an infamous criminal defense lawyer named Nicholas Bell- a man who gained affluence by keeping criminals out of jail. One day, Katherine was killed in a hit-and-run accident, an incident that Owen blamed on her father’s involvement with vengeful mobsters. Thus, Owen (born Ethan Young) upheaved his life in Austen, Texas, to protect his daughter Bailey (born Kristin) and sever their ties with Nicholas’s criminal activities. The entirety of Nicholas Bell's story is available online and discovered by Hannah through a simple Google search. It’s staggering that Hannah found such specific information about some of the most common names in the world. This plot twist feels overly convenient and anti-climactic for her detective work.

Following this “breakthrough”, Hannah’s priority becomes to protect Bailey at all costs. Hannah refuses to go into witness protection and her (newfound) knack for negotiation comes in handy. She somehow convinces Nicholas Bell to let Bailey and her return to their home in California, all while being sheltered from Nicholas’s criminal involvement. Readers jump to “happily ever after” following this one measly conversation, a deal that leads Hannah to lose the love of her life in order to protect his stubborn daughter instead. Owen can no longer be in their lives, but Hannah and Bailey are both weirdly calm about it.

The story built up in the first half, only to come crumbling down in the second. In the end, Owen did hardly anything. Yes, he was involved in the “behind the scenes” efforts of some criminal activity, but this is not nearly enough to satisfy the cravings of a voracious reader like me. In a fabricated world, your husband’s sudden disappearance should mean he’s a serial killer or multi-million-dollar drug lord, not that he was involved indirectly with his father-in-law’s shady lawyering practice, and even now, readers are uncertain about Owen’s degree of responsibility.

Halfway through the novel, I assumed that Owen was guilty of killing his first wife, but I was crazy in hoping for something so exciting from this book. In another potential story arc, I imagined that Owen’s boss, Avett Thompson, the man who brought Owen into Hannah’s woodworking shop when they first met, had somehow swindled Hannah into his company’s fraudulent activities. Hannah had mentioned that Avett and his wife spent thousands, if not more, purchasing furniture from her. This could have been a strategy to entangle Hannah in his company’s shady business. Hannah was an easy outlet for money laundering purposes, and her income would inevitably connect back to the company after Owen married her. Avett would be the mastermind behind this, and Owen the complacent pawn. Owen’s disappearance would then have been a last-ditch effort to protect his family and a way to direct the blame entirely onto himself. This alternate plotline might be flawed, and my money laundering knowledge is limited, but having finished this book, this new idea could realistically stand. 

Nevertheless, because of Owen’s selfishness, Hannah and Bailey were left with only each other. Hannah married Owen, the love of her life, only to be stuck with his teenage daughter, and Bailey lost both her birth mother and father to senseless criminal activity.

After all this, Laura Dave does her job right; readers have no choice but to root for Hannah and Bailey as they are the only victims in this story. Owen was a terrible husband and an even worse father. He ran away from his problems in hopes that his absence would protect his family from the bad guys, but in the end, he became one too.