Taylor AdamsRecensioni

Very strange book, so many different versions of the story being told by various characters that by the end I wasn't sure what I was supposed to think. Not the style of mystery book that I enjoy.

The longer I sit with this book, the more I hate it. The slow as hell reveals made it hard to sympathize with the heroine, but that is the least of the book's problems, the main one being the terrible mental health portrayal, as well as the twist being just so... not for me.

If you liked this book, I am so glad you got something out of it that I didn't.

How could a book blogger specializing in crime fiction not read a book about the dire consequences one character has when she posts a one-star review? I certainly couldn't resist the temptation!

The Last Word feels like it was written to be turned into a movie, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it would be better as a movie. Emma Carpenter is a sympathetic character, and I was quickly drawn into her solitary life on the rainy Washington coast. Her golden retriever Laika made a good companion, and her telescope-and-white-board games of Hangman with her nearest neighbor did give her some human contact. But the more I read, the more questions I had. What was Emma hiding from? And that neighbor of hers was a bit strange, too. Why would an author seemingly go off the deep end over a one-star review?

The questions were piling up, and I was engrossed in the story until everything started unraveling at the halfway mark. This is when readers started being told the story from the point of view of a serial killer who kept dropping hints about what was going to happen to Emma.

At that point, the twists and turns of the plot started coming thick and fast. There were just too many of them, and I had two reactions to them. One, it felt as though the author was showing off. Two, I felt like Wile E. Coyote, getting repeatedly hammered by his latest ACME purchase.

Before the halfway mark, The Last Word was a winner. After that point, I was tempted to throw it against the wall (but I couldn't because I didn't want to damage my Kindle). If you've read, or intend to read, The Last Word, I certainly hope your mileage varies.½

Gripping plot and clever story-telling that doesn't just word vomit the story and characters' backstories at you in one overwhelming go. Instead, the author provides breadcrumbs throughout, helping to segment the story while slowly revealing more about the characters and the plot-relevant context. This is often done through impressively executed POV switches/flashbacks to help enrich the storytelling. The main character is very openly flawed and still incredibly likable and relatable. Definitely a bit gruesome, but besides the more graphic scenes just adding visceral imagery, I do believe they serve an immersive and suspenseful purpose which is why I found it easier to stomach. The story lines up perfectly at the end, all the pieces click in to place (even with the plot twists). Most importantly the ending is SATISFYING. As violent and sad as parts of the book were, it ended with a uniquely uplifting tone that I found inspiring. The plot was a good mixture of realistic, cliche, and exceptional enough that it proves to be a story worth telling.½

So I just have to say that I absolutely loved this book. It was the perfect amount of suspense. It had great twists and turns. I really didn't want to put this one down because I had to know how it ended. I enjoyed that we had no idea who we could trust at this rest stop. What I really enjoyed was the way the author gave you an answer so quickly that you just knew that wasn't it... I have to admit the book does not disappoint on the new twists and turns. The various layers to this one are just amazing. It really becomes this game of cat and mouse between Darby and the kidnapper. I think it was interesting how the author incorporated this fight for survival in our characters.

Darby was a really well written character... she has her flaws but also she has an amazing survival instinct. She quickly adapts to the situations that arise and I enjoyed watching how she problem solved. I have to say the last little bit of the book got super tense and had me on the edge of my seat because I had no idea what was going to happen. It did not unfold anything like I thought it would and I loved that. If you are a fan of the locked in type thrillers I really think this is one that you would enjoy. If you love mind games this one is full of them. It was a really great thriller. It had all the elements. I think it really managed to put the suspense throughout and then save up this huge level of tension for the end.

Fabulous...it kept me on the edge of my seat. An emotional rollercoaster!
It's clever, it's surprising and so engaging. It is definitely not a story that is predictable.
Taylor Adams is an excellent writer. I'd be afraid to say differently...lol! Well, you should read this book and understand why!
But let's get into things...the author really holds back on some details but then offers others through an unreliable narrator. Even realizing that I was mesmerized. The story captivated me to the last sentence.
I cried at the end! What a great book!

A solid and truly entertaining thriller! I personally have never read a suspense novel quite like this and appreciated the freshness Adams brought to his work. He took fairly familiar tropes, like being stranded in a snowstorm and a gathering of strangers, and made it his own. I also think the main character, Darby, was really well written. She didn't make stupid choices and I felt like her thought processes throughout this situation felt genuine and human, which I think can be a weak point in many hyped thrillers. Additionally, the suspense/gasp-out-loud aspects were REAL. There's kinda a big plot twist right near the start of things that I absolutely didn't see coming, and things just escalate from there. The plot and writing were genuinely creepy and didn't rely on cheap moments of suspense. "No Exit" is unnerving if nothing else.
The only things that weren't great for me were 1) the part about Darby's mom having cancer. She repeatedly states how bad their relationship was, and that didn't quite fit in to how Darby was acting. It almost felt like Adams just needed some dire-sounding situation to get Darby out here in the first place and just decided to throw a cancer plot in. 2) No spoilers, but portions of the ending felt a bit dragged on. The story naturally reaches a climax and conclusion but Adams dragged it on a little more than I think was needed. If he had redirected those extra pages into the middle of the novel I think it would have been better!

Thriller

No one star here. Afraid for my life. Not as many surprise twists as everyone said. I kind of predicted two of them. And I mean the neighbor was a dead give away from the start.

I didn't love this book. I listened to it on audio, so I thought maybe that was the issue, but I listened to The Last Word too and loved that one. I just felt like it was a little boring, despite it attempting to be non-stop action like their other books. I was really just more anxious to have this book done so I could move on to other ones. At the same time, it was good enough that I didn't DNF it. It's about twin sisters and one dies on a bridge and they think it's a suicide, but the twin thinks she was murdered. In the end, the cop was bad, but he also took over his twin's identity after he committed suicide. Just a weird story. There was a blog that Lena (the alive twin) was keeping. I got a little lost in the other people that showed up at the bridge between Cambry's event on the bridge and Lena's event on the bridge. It bounced back and forth, which usually I'm fine with, but I got a little confused in there. I still really want to read No Exit and enjoyed The Last Word. Maybe this is why I hadn't heard of this novel before I randomly found it on the Libby app.

(2021) Very good thriller about Lena, a surviving twin, who tries to figure out how & why her sister Cambry died. It was an apparent suicide, but Lena finds too many incongruities. Leads her to interview the state trooper that found the body below the bridge. She quickly finds that Cambry was not only killed be this cop but by his serial killer father. Cambry, it turns out, had fallen for this cop who was unable to hide the killings from her that led to her jumping from the bridge. Lena manages to kill both of the killers and in the end rescues a young boy that had been thrown into a nearby well. Bookpage (Bruce Tierney):Twins are often said to share a special bond. That certainly seemed to be the case with Cambry and Lena Nguyen, until Cambry's unexpected suicide. At the outset of Taylor Adams' gripping thriller Hairpin Bridge, Lena is beginning to come to terms with her loss but still feels like there is something off about the official police account of Cambry's death. So she decides to travel to Montana to get a firsthand look at the bridge from which her twin allegedly jumped to her death. She meets with Corporal Raymond Raycevic, the officer who discovered the body; he is affable and forthcoming, but something feels strange about him as well. The pragmatic Lena is aware that she may be grasping at straws, as if wishing that the cause of her sister's death were something other than suicide might make it so. But early on, Lena discovers that Corporal Raycevic had stopped Cambry for speeding just a short time before she died. His glib explanation and wave-of-the-hand dismissal of this coincidence rings false to Lenaor, at the very least, seems incomplete. And so a game of cat and mouse begins, and readers won't find out until the final pages whether Lena is a grief-stricken fantasist or an exceptionally canny adversary (albeit one who is perhaps destined for the same fate as her sister). Hairpin Bridge reads like a Stephen King novel and is especially reminiscent of Misery in how the characters shape-shift as the narrative progresses, leaving the reader wondering who is more dangerous�and more importantly, which one will prevail.

No Exit by Taylor Adams is one of my favourite thrillers so really wanted to give The Last Word ago. This book follows Emma Carpenter who is recovering from a personal tradgey. She decides to house sit in an isolated house with little contact with anyone else. She spends her day reading and gives her latest read a one star review. The author is not happy at all.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I did No Exit but I think that is going to take some beating. This offering certainly had a lot going on and was full on action right up to the end.

I enjoyed the premise with the isolated setting and felt the story was enjoyable. I did think however that plot, and all the action did venture into thrillerland and was a little over the top. I didn't guess who the perp was or why.

This book was a typical thriller with lots of twists and turns. I will definitely read more books by the author in the future.

This book kept me guessing the whole time. Looking forward to reading more books by Adams.

This book was non-stop excitement from beginning to end! There were some things that could have been explained better (like the coloured cards), and sometimes assumptions were made that just came out of nowhere, but overall an exciting and enjoyable read!

College student Darby Thorne is on her way to see her dying mother when she gets caught in a blizzard in the Colorado Rockies. She manages to pull into a rest stop where four other people are also waiting out the storm. There’s no cell phone signal, but at least there’s a bathroom, a vending machine and coffee. When she goes outside in hopes of getting a signal, she makes a horrifying discovery. There is a child locked in a cage in the back of one of the vehicles. Can Darby figure out whose car this is and get the child to safety? It will be a long night.

This is a gripping psychological thriller, with several twists and turns. Darby is a courageous, if naïve, young woman. She never stops thinking of ways to save herself, the child, and the innocent people in the shelter. But she makes several mistaken assumptions that compromise her plan(s) and may just lead to massive casualties.

I was completely caught up in this scenario, although there were times when I wanted to shake Darby to get her away from what I saw as an obvious mistake. She certainly got one thing right – the criminal is NOT really smart, just determined and callous. The question is whether Darby can last the night, and that kept me turning pages long past my bedtime.

I listened to the audiobook. And what people say about Taylor Adams is true. It grips you and doesn't let you go. I couldn't believe how suspensive this entire book was. It has great twists. A few I saw coming and a few I didn't. These are probably not books that will "stay with you" but super entertaining in the moment and I absolutely flew through this. And of course, the believability is low too, but hey, it's a book for entertainment. The end where she's drugged and thrown into the water with a backpack weighed down with rocks and she's able to live from that. lol. Funny! But again, the entertainment value was definitely here and excited to check out more from this author.

Wow, what a ride! I literally couldn’t put this down. Read in one day. It was so good!!!

Ughhh…
Great idea, but predictable and very, very, VERY boring.

Emma reads a deeply terrible self-published novel about the murder of two women, told with a little too much relish from the killer's POV. She leaves a one-star review. The author is not pleased. And then she realizes that someone is after her...

I have to say, early on I was wondering if picking this one up wasn't a giant mistake. There's something about having the main character nitpicking a badly written thriller that makes it much harder not to notice all the imperfections and implausibilities in the work you're currently reading. But, credit where it's due, the author of this one does take some of those resulting expectations about narrative and play around with them in some at least mildly clever ways. Most of the twists still end up being pretty obvious, and I can't exactly say it made my pulse pound in suspense or anything, but it did work better than I expected it to, and the end result is a fast-reading and fairly pleasant (albeit violent) piece of slightly meta-feeling brain candy.½

I don't really know what I was expecting, but somehow this wasn't quite it. I guess I thought there was going to be some kind of conceptual twist, but it's just a straight-up thriller. It's a fun concept, but I couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be a satire or not. For all the complaints about gruesome sadism in thrillers (complaints from the main character), there seemed to be a lot of gruesome sadism in the book itself? Not really my cup of tea, but definitely very fast moving.½

This is a good one!

2.5⭐️

After a personal tragedy, Emma Carpenter chose to live in isolation in a house on the Washington Coast. Her sole companion is her golden retriever Laika, and her interaction with others is limited to the owner of the house, Jules and her elderly neighbor, Deek, with whom she communicates via handwritten messages from her window. Emma spends a lot of time reading. After her neighbor recommends a horror novel by an author by the name of H.G.Kane, which she doesn’t enjoy for several reasons (that are quite believable), she doesn’t hesitate to share in her one-star review – a review that prompts the author to initiate an online conversation with her. Needless to say, he wants her to change her rating, which she absolutely refuses to do. The online conversation gets heated with both of them trading insults. Just when she thinks that things have calmed down, Emma begins to feel like she is being watched and also suspects the presence of someone in the house. Are her fears unfounded, or is she really being stalked? If so, to what end?

The premise of The Last Word by Taylor Adams is original and enticing.For me, the premise was the best part of this story. I really enjoyed how the author builds on the premise up to a point ( the first 100-odd pages are suspenseful, well-structured and fast-paced). However, as the narrative progresses, the pace does begin to drag, the elements that were meant to build up the tension begin to feel a tad repetitive and the characters all too unbelievable (and maybe a tad stereotypical, bordering on ridiculous?). The narrative is long-winded with too much going on. I enjoy twisty reads, but with too many twists, I found myself losing interest in the plot around the midway mark. I did love Laika, the dog, and though the ending did redeem the book to an extent, overall, I can’t say this was a satisfying read.

WOW...Really well written..The audible version is really great.

25% dnf. This one is not for me.

That was terrifying! And, I will definitely not ever leave a 1-star review on Amazon!!!
Emma is grieving, blaming herself for a car crash when she wasn't paying attention. She decides to go to WA state, and house sit. Her neighbor, a local author, Deacon Cowl, advises her to read a mystery. She does, and she gives it a 1-star review. The author, HG Kline, asks her to take it down. She refuses.
This begins a terrifying story of Emma trying to escape the author who is trying to kill her. She trades messages with her neighbor Deek, hoping he can help her escape the killer.
What follows is a frightening tale where Emma has to determine who the real danger to her is, and how she can survive.