The Last to See Me: A Novel
By: M Dressler / Narrated By: Lauren Ezzo
Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
Beautifully written with twists and turns… And whazzis? Sequels?!
Okay so, like, The Last to See Me was a pleasant surprise! I got it as part of a kindle/whisper-sync sale, and some of those are rather iffy. When kindles go on Daily Deals, ‘twould appear, given my experience of the end results, that those stories are uuuuusually half-patooted semi-decently written stories. I think what motivated my purchase was that a) I was hoping for the best b) The paired audiobook was narrated by Lauren Ezzo and c) I have SUCH poor impulse control when it comes to “Audiobook on Sale for Cheeeeap”.
So I went in with a fairly low bar in tow.
Right away, the writing was beautiful; what a fine surprise! Heroine/Ghostie Emma Rose Finnis waxes oh-so poetically about the lives and deaths of hard workers and the lives of the wastrel/using rich. She starts her tale with how life was over a hundred years before, when she was poor and a washerwoman for loggers, when she scrubbed and cleaned on the side at the Lambry mansion.
Emma, now very much dead, is looking out from her berth within the empty and soon to be sold Lambry mansion where a Cleaner has been summoned. The town had supPOSedly been cleaned, but what’s this? A ghost remains? And said ghost, Emma, is NOT a shade who’ll go quietly into that good night. She tells us it takes Will to remain, it takes the spirit to Fight for one’s Life/Existence.
Philip Pratt is the Cleaner (Ghost Hunter), and as he wanders the estate, he notes first contact with Emma: She’s seen fit to get one of the famed yet overgrown Lambry roses to scratch him: Emma means business. But why is Pratt here in the first place?
Wellllll, it’s like this, see: The Lambry mansion is up for sale, and turns out that Emma did NOT like the pair who were looking at it. In some fairly stunning prose, author M Dressler writes a pretty terrific scene with Emma twisting turning wrenching and sinking the couple as Emma traps the pair in a dark pantry. If the opening sentences didn’t have me fairly awe-struck with the rhythm of the story, this practically demonic haunting sure ‘nuff did.
This is a story that’s a back and forth between Emma’s past and Pratt’s present. Usually I don’t like those, and I see plenty of reviewers weren’t too fond of this either. I disagree; I was wholly onboard with listening to HOURS of Emma’s slowly unwinding life as she navigated her stints as maid in the village to her banishment as a housekeeper for a set of households serving a lighthouse. Not much you can get up to in such an out of the way place, but I found Emma’s tale there fairly AWEsome as we see her development from a somewhat lovestruck young woman (Quint Lambry, a younger Lambry son, has fallen for her and will not leave her completely alone during her banishment) as she grows into a woman who has pluck and courage, even as she struggles within the confines of societal expectations for women of the time.
Ya see, I liked this because it sooo reminded me of stumbling upon Simone St. James’s Silence for the Dead where it was aaaaaallll about story story story. This is character-driven withOUT skimping on plot. There’s romance, but it in no way overwhelms twisted hauntings. It slowly unfolds as we’re not given HOW Emma came to be there tho’ she is overcome by water and the desperate need for air, so we’re plenty certain she drowned. But as she navigates her life as poor and fairly cut off, so do we see her as an independent thinker, we see her as the stalwart and driven ghost she’ll become.
Lauren Ezzo knocks it outta the park from the get-go with her gentle Irish accent for Emma Rose, as tho’ she’s from an Irish family who’s been in the States for her whole life. Ezzo further does Pratt and the firecracker real estate agent Ellen de Wright who just wants Pratt to get on with it and wrap things up, before her own oops! secrets come out. Ezzo manages all of this with such ease, and she has simply lovely tones to perfectly pair with the grim yet beautiful writing.
Twists and turns, a Whodunnit starts to develop near the end where we’re not terribly certain that Emma is the only ghost in the story, or the most hate-ridden and destructive. The ending kinda comes outta left field, and that was probably the weakest part of the tale. I actually had to go back and listen to it again cuz I didn’t believe that Dressler actually went there, but she did. And what’s this I see: Not one but two sequels?
They’re pretty pricey, so I do believe I’ll wait. Until aNOther Daily Deal, aNOther whisper-sync pairing.
The only thing better than a truly good story is a truly good story On Sale. I won’t even TRY to rein in that ol’ Impulse…
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