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A Novel
by Mary McGarry Morris
Book Reviewed by:Nora Hammond is a woman blessed with the perfect life: a charming husband, two bright teenage children, a successful career. But Nora's comfortable existence threatens to unravel when she learns of her husband's longtime affair, and a sordid incident from her youth returns with terrifying force.
Mary McGarry Morris has been hailed as "one of the most skillful writers at work in America today" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In The Last Secret, she tells the riveting story of Nora Hammond, a woman blessed with the perfect life: a charming husband, two bright teenage children, a successful career in the family's newspaper business, and an esteemed role in the charity work of her New England town. But Nora's comfortable existence threatens to unravel when she learns of her husband's longtime affair–and when the specter of a sordid incident from her youth returns with terrifying force.
Confronted by shame and betrayal, Nora suddenly feels dangerously alone. With no one to turn to, she becomes easy prey to a ghost from her past–the cunning, relentless Eddie Hawkins.
A tautly told tale of psychological tension and chilling moral complexity, The Last Secret accelerates to a shattering conclusion as it explores the irreparable consequences of one family's crimes of the heart. The Last Secret burnishes Mary McGarry Morris's reputation as one of our most prodigiously gifted writers.
They still don't believe her, and why should they, but it's always the same, it is – this same dream, darkness, heat, and the song, the same song, same deafening beat.
Driving. Midnight. Still driving; their beacon through the desert, flashing lights, pink and green neon from the roadhouse roof. Eddie cruises the parking lot. He parks on the farthest side, in shadows. Tired and hungry, she slips after him into the reek of beery dust. It coats the bar top, the windows, the dimly lit jukebox blasting that song "Gimme Some Lovin'
" over and over and over again. Their luck's about to change, Eddie says. He feeds quarters into the jukebox, the last of their money –hers, mostly.
Sitting behind them, the only other customer, a skinny man, grimy shirt, loosened tie, jacket bunched up next to his beer mug. His head bobs over the table. Her own face floats in the murky bar mirror, outlined in blinking red ...
14 BookBrowse members reviewed this book for "First Impressions" with an average review of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Read the reviews...continued
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(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
Mary McGarry Morris was born in Meriden, Connecticut in l943 and raised in Rutland, Vermont
with three younger brothers. She was educated at Mount Saint Joseph Academy in
Rutland, the University of Vermont, and the University of Massachusetts.
She is
married to Michael W. Morris, an attorney, and is the mother of five children,
and grandmother of twelve. She lives on the North Shore in Massachusetts.
Her first novel,
Vanished, was published in 1988. Written over a
ten-year period with only her husband and children aware of her writing effort,
it was rejected twenty-seven times before an agent, Jean Naggar, helped her
sell it to Viking Press - it went on to be nominated for
the National Book Award and...
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