Thomas H. Cook

Harvard educated historian Lucas Page has come to St. Louis to promote his latest book in front of a small group of "museum regulars," none of whom, as it turns out, have any interest in actually taking a copy of the book home with them. Just when he's ready to call it a night, Lucas is approached at his table by what he at first assumes is a homeless woman. But then he realizes that he is looking into the eyes of Lola Faye Gilroy, the very woman he still blames for his father's murder two decades earlier.

"She'd come to make her case before me, clarify the issue Woody Gilroy had raised in his suicide note, rid herself of the guilt he'd laid at her feet, revisit all that in a talk with me, then enter her plea at the end of it: not guilty."

Or had she?

Feeling a little as if he'd been tricked into it, Lucas finds himself agreeing to have a drink with Lola Faye so that they can have a talk about their lives in the aftermath of what happened all those years ago. Lucas, under the impression that Lola Faye is still the uneducated and naive small-town Alabama girl she was when his father hired her to clerk in the family variety store, figures that their conversation will be a short one. Just a quick drink, a little polite conversation, and Lola Faye will be out of his life again - exactly where she belongs.

But then Lola Faye starts asking questions, good ones. And those questions cause Lucas to rethink everything he was so certain that he knew about the night his father was shot to death in his own kitchen by someone lurking outside in the dark. Long before Lucas realizes it, Lola Faye has taken over the conversation and she's guiding it exactly where she wants it to end up.

"The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right."

The Last Talk with Lola Faye is an intense novel, one in which the pressure is turned up so gradually that the reader ends up being lulled into the same false sense of complacency that Lucas experiences. As it became clearer and clearer that Lucas is correct in feeling threatened by where Lola Faye is leading the conversation, I couldn't turn pages fast enough. Even so, the book's ending is a completely satisfying one that I never saw coming. And that's a good thing.

This is my first experience with a Thomas H. Cook novel, and that strikes me as remarkable considering how much crime fiction I've read over the last several decades and that Cook has written something like three dozen novels. But that's kind of nice, really, because now I have Cook's huge back catalog to explore, including Red Leaves, the one I started a couple of days ago.… (more)