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It’s not always easy to get the pacing of a thriller right, and that’s something The Last Time We Saw Her by Jaclyn Goldis* struggles with. An author wants to create buildup, but they also need to hook the reader in from the start.
The Last Time We Saw Her is told via multiple POVs, including the POV of the girl who went missing 10 years earlier. In fact, the opening tells us exactly what happened to her, but not who did it, and so, we’re taken into a story knowing the outcome for Sydney, but not who did it and why.
It Takes About 57% of the Book to Get Into It
I don’t mind spending a good 10 to 20 percent of a book getting to know the characters. This is important, and having a dead body show up before that can make it difficult to understand who everyone is, including the victim.
While we do learn what happened to Sydney early on, she doesn’t end up becoming the big part of the story. Sure, everyone is doing a documentary on the 10-year anniversary of her disappearance, but this isn’t where the real mystery lies.
It lies in the present-day actions. Lexa is hiding something big from her husband, someone tries to kill Reuben, and Olivia is simply trying to figure out what happened all those years ago while dealing with seeing her father, whom she hasn’t seen for years.
It’s around the 57 percent mark that things really pick up. There’s another dead body, and suddenly, the mystery is in what happened. Who would want to kill one of the friend group? That was the part that I was hooked on, but it shouldn’t have taken that long to really get into it.
In fact, I kept switching between The Last Time We Saw Her and another book until this point. I just wasn’t invested in any of the characters. At this point, I had to finish it to get all the answers, and the ending left me with so many questions.
All the Character Felt Like Teenagers
I kept having to double-check how old everyone was supposed to be 10 years earlier. It felt like they were all teenagers in the present day, but they were 16-17 when Sydney went missing.
This kept taking me out of the story. I felt like we were reading some YA drama that was going to turn out to be kids making terrible decisions back in the past. Instead, it was teenagers who made the terrible decisions, and they, as adults, did not really learn from anything from the past.
They were all selfish people, and while I love seeing flaws in the characters, the development didn’t always seem to fit. Lexa’s big reveal felt like it came out of nowhere, as her personality didn’t seem to match the reveal at the end. There wasn’t enough time spent with Olivia to really feel like she thought she was seeing her sister around the island.
I wonder if The Last Time We Saw Her could have been maybe another 50 to 100 pages longer, with a few more clues splattered in. After all, we read from the murderer’s POV, and there wasn’t any hint that this was who it was. It all seemed to come out of left field, and while I don’t mind a twist, I like to be able to go back and see what I missed. I don’t feel like I missed anything, as it just felt like so much high school drama was going on.
In the end, I’m rating The Last Time We Saw Her a 3.5 stars out of 5. It wasn’t for me, but I loved The Chateau, so I’m going to give Goldis’s next book a read! I do think with slightly better pacing, I could have gotten over the feel of the ages of the characters.
The Last Time We Saw Her by Jaclyn Goldis* is now available to buy.
