{"id":1904,"date":"2022-10-13T01:33:15","date_gmt":"2022-10-13T01:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=1904"},"modified":"2023-03-11T18:30:27","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T18:30:27","slug":"the-last-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=1904","title":{"rendered":"The Last Word"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Emma Carpenter is house-sitting in near-total isolation on the Washington coast. For company there\u2019s Laika, her Golden Retriever; a retired alcoholic author a half-mile up the coast with whom she exchanges brief messages; and the occasional delivery person. Something\u2019s bugging Emma. After all, you don\u2019t take a gig like this unless you\u2019ve got a project you\u2019re working on or some issues you need to resolve, and for Emma it\u2019s the latter. She keeps herself occupied by walking Laika and reading thrillers, plowing through two ebooks a day until she comes across a novel so misogynistic, so poorly written, she can\u2019t help but give it a negative review, setting off an online dialog with the author, who demands the review be retracted. That\u2019s when things start to get weird\u2014and tension starts to heighten\u2014as every evening the security lights switch on and off, or Emma hears footsteps in the house, or the CCTV catches an intruder outside her door\u2014complete with ghoulish mask. Could it possibly be the author Emma has been arguing with? Whomever, it is, Emma is no damsel in distress, and she\u2019d rather fight than run. <strong>From there the narrative speeds up, the terror mounts, and the layers of plot begin to unfold until the reader feels like they\u2019re strapped to a one-person luge, runners greased and no way to get free. Perfect for the nail biters.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Emma Carpenter is house-sitting in near-total isolation on the Washington coast. For company there\u2019s Laika, her Golden Retriever; a retired alcoholic author a half-mile up the coast with whom she&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[50,51],"class_list":["post-1904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-suspense","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Last-Word-1-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Last-Word-1.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}