Last to Die

Teddy Clock has survived a massacre twice before the age of fourteen — first his family, then his foster family — and now he is the lone survivor again, wanted by a killer whose pattern suggests Teddy is not coincidental but targeted. Jane Rizzoli sends him to a remote boarding school for trauma survivors while she and Maura Isles pursue the thread connecting his history to others on the same property. The tenth Rizzoli and Isles novel is structured as a doubled mystery: find the killer of the past and the present simultaneously.

Tanya Eby narrates the novel's multiple timelines and settings — Boston, rural Maine, the strange sanctuary of Evensong — with the tonal clarity that keeps the thriller mechanics functioning. Her handling of the boarding school sequences gives them the appropriate quality of refuge-as-danger, a difficult register to sustain without tipping into horror. At just over 10 hours, Last to Die is a well-constructed thriller with genuine emotional investment.