Mary McGarry Morris, one of America's finest writers and the author of Songs in Ordinary Time and A Dangerous Woman, presents this riveting new novel that explores the irreparable consequences of one family's crimes of the heart.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Keeping secrets leads to calamitous consequences in Morris's disturbing domestic thriller. At age 17, Nora Trimble has a dangerous eight-day summer escapade with psycho boyfriend Eddie Hawkins that ends in a violent incident in a bar. Twenty-six years later, Nora is the happy wife of wealthy Kendall Ken Hammond, co-owner of a smalltown Massachusetts newspaper, and the devoted mother of two teens. Her world's turned upside down by Eddie's shocking reappearance and Ken's revelation that he's been having an adulterous relationship for four years with his childhood sweetheart Robin Gendron, his best friend's wife. Nora must contend with not only marital woes but the blackmailing serial killer Eddie, who refuses to leave town because of his new obsession—Robin. Morris (The Lost Mother) knocks over a domino chain of events that, while not too surprising, confirm the importance of comprehending past mistakes to avoid future ones. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
One assumes that a woman who marries into a family of privilege has the world on a string. Nora Hammond felt that way about her own life. Married with two teenage children, a prominent job at her husband’s family newspaper, socializing with the wealthy and powerful, Nora was living her picture-perfect life—until her husband, Ken, reveals he has been having a “relationship” with one of Nora’s best friends for years. What follows is a wrenching portrait of a family falling apart under the weight and ramifications of the affair and their futile struggle to stay together. As if this wasn’t emotionally compelling enough, Morris, unfortunately, adds a subplot—a man from Nora’s past comes back to haunt her. It is unnecessary, distracting, and at times ruins the psychological arc Morris works to build. In the end, Morris ties the stories together, but it feels forced and unsatisfying. Those who follow this highly regarded author will want to read The Last Secret; those new to Morris should start with an earlier title. --Carolyn Kubisz
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
(3.5) "The good and the bad, love, hate, they always end the same.",
By Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Last Secret: A Novel (Hardcover)
McGarry Morris has written a number of provocative novels, this one dealing with the foolish mistakes of youth, an inappropriate love affair and a marriage laid bare by a husband's confessed infidelity. Nora Hammond, living in a small New England town with husband, Kendall, and two teenaged children, Chloe and Drew, has put the nightmarish events of her youth aside as a wife and mother. Working at the family-owned newspaper, Nora has found fulfillment, believing the past far behind her. Until her husband's rash confession, the only hint of trouble is the occasional bad dream of the fateful night Nora last saw Eddie Hawkins. Ken's baring of his soul reduces Nora's bliss to a pile of ashes, his affair undermining everything she has counted on in her relationship with Ken. Vacillating between rage and grief, Nora struggles with Ken's revelation, unable to get a grip on her emotions. What is barely tolerable becomes unendurable with the return of the boyfriend who suddenly appears at Nora's home, office and social events. She doesn't know what Eddie wants from her, only that a shameful secret must not come out. As she begins the stages of grief over Ken's betrayal of their marriage, the reader is compelled to follow in the wake of this Nora's pain, her anguish at Ken's infidelity vying with her desire to confront the woman who has taken her place in his affections. Oblivious to everyone in her pain, Nora is further shocked to realize the long-term affair has long been the topic of interest for friends, coworkers and acquaintances. Even her son has carried the weight of Ken's infidelity long before Nora learns the truth. Perhaps Nora's reaction is appropriate, reasonable even; it is her inability to resist the lure of the wronged victim that becomes tedious, an endless rehashing of memories, the small signs she should have noticed, the shame of everyone knowing about the affair. Nora's family is deeply dysfunctional, Ken unworthy of the anguish Nora suffers, their family façade exposed by a husband's infidelity and lame excuse for his actions, "It just happened". It is Nora's willful blindness that becomes irritating, as well as the jarring reappearance of Eddie Hawkins. Then there is Nora's confusing response to Eddie's veiled threats. Unfortunately, the introduction of this bizarre character from the past allows the author to avoid the difficult resolution of a family in crisis, allowing a more spectacular ending than the usual denouement of such a marriage. Most curious is the emotional evolution of the protagonist, Nora as firmly entrenched in the role of victim as when the novel begins: "I've lived my whole life trying to keep one step ahead of what I am." Luan Gaines/2009.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Behind the simplest reality, betrayal".,
By Bonnie Brody "Book Lover and Knitter" (Port St. Lucie, FL) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 100 REVIEWER)
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This review is from: The Last Secret: A Novel (Hardcover)
There are some books and authors that I'd like to have with me on a desert island. Mary McGarry Morris is one of those writers. I have always been drawn to her books, their dark and brooding nature with the sentience of doom and fatality omnipresent. I can almost smell the darkness when I read her novels, feel the desperation of the dissolute and the outsider. I have read all but two of her books and those two I'm saving for a very special time and place - - a desert island kind of moment. She's THAT good a writer.
The Last Secret is powerful and unflinching. It builds up slowly but the tension and angst keep coming. The characters are disgruntled, desperate, despairing, fragile, with huge currents roiling through their being as they try to keep their inner and outer storms at bay. Some characters are loathsome, despicable and pathetic. These are juxtaposed with others who try to stay strong, keep one foot in front of the other, and maintain independence at all costs. What Ms. Morris is so excellent at portraying is that while people try to fool themselves into believing that they have certain attributes better, worse, or more unique than others, most people are actually quite alike in that they harbor these components: the good, the bad and the evil. When she was seventeen years old, Nora ran off with a troubled young man named Eddie Hawkins. During the week she was with him she drank a lot, got into situations that were outside her comfort range and behaved in ways that she thought were completely outside her moral compass. At one point Eddie asks her to come on to an older man and encourage him to follow her outside a bar so that Eddie can rob him. The older man follows her and something dreadful happens. Nora is never sure of the exact details but she has a recurrent nightmare that the man has his face bashed in by a tire iron and that she is the one who commits the crime. What she also remembers, is that after the 'incident' she is covered with blood and that she hitches a ride with a semi driver who manages to get her away from the scene of the crime and encourages her to call her mother. She calls her mother and returns home, bringing with her a lifetime of guilt and nightmares. Skip forward twenty-five years. Nora is now happily married (so the thinks) to a man named Ken and she has two teen-aged children, Drew and Chloe. She has married into old money and works on the family-owned newspaper in New England. From the outside, everyone is happy and the family looks perfect but, as Nora believes, "Happiness so often trails a long shadow". She soon finds out that Ken has been having a 'relationship' for the past four years with one of her best friends. Nora's world is shattered. Her family is torn apart and in the process other, and often darker, secrets come to light. "Behind every truth lurks a darker truth. Behind the simplest reality, betrayal." Nora is philanthropic and she is deeply involved with the volunteer board for Sojourn House, a home for battered women. Sojourn House has received national attention and Nora is being photographed by Newsweek magazine for her work there. Eddie Hawkins, sociopathic and narcissistic, sees Nora's picture in the magazine and recognizes her from their week together twenty-five years earlier. He travels across the country to Nora's hometown and sets himself up there in a cheap hotel. He contacts Nora who does not know what he wants but she has a stomach-turning, gut-wrenching uneasiness about seeing him. Her gut reaction is that he has sought her out to blackmail her for the role she had in what she thinks may have been a murder twenty-five years previously. She is a victim of perceived blackmail. Eddie Hawkins arrives just as her marriage and life are falling apart. Though fragile, angry and unsure on the inside, Nora comes across as independent, strong and almost cold on the outside. This is a common theme in Ms. Morris's books - - the outside harbors the seeds of the inside, and vice verse. As Nora is dealing with one family secret and betrayal after another, the book proceeds to get darker and darker, with a deeply ingenious plot and wonderfully deep and crisp characterizations. I felt like I could reach out and touch the characters, they came so alive. Characterization is one of Ms. Morris's greatest gifts (and she has many). She examines the inner and outer worlds of her protagonists and leaves no stone left unturned. That, along with a breath holding plot, make this one of the best books I've read this year. I finished the book in two days, hardly coming up for air. My only disappointment was that I didn't want it to end. I wanted to continue to be a fly on the wall watching, and watching, and watching some more.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nora's Shroud: Denial that Kills,
By
This review is from: The Last Secret: A Novel (Hardcover)
Mary McGarry Morris' latest book, while it achieves the stylistic grace and satisfying characterization of her earlier novels, fails to live up to her reputation as a writer's writer because she allows the storyline to veer off track into unnecessary details and subplots which merely burden the book without rendering further insight. As is her forte, she once again creates vivid characters whose actions are believable up to a point. One could argue that she "turns the screw" too many times so that the resulting quagmire is unnecessarily dense. However, the stunning "last secret" is credible in the same way her psychopathic protagonist in "Vanished" was. This is a dark book, but Morris' readers have come to expect that and presumably appreciate the glimpses into complicated mental disorders she depicts in her lost protagonists. The book centers on affluent, socially prominent Nora Hammond, who is married to Ken, an old moneyed, respected community leader and owner of the local newspaper. When approached by Eddie Hawkins, a sleazy consort from her past who sees her in "Newsweek," helping out in a battered women's charity, Nora offers him money rather than have a dirty secret of her youth exposed. The reader believes this "secret" is the assault of a drunken man in a parking lot, an incident Nora cannot remember because she was drinking heavily at the time. However, she still revisits it in recurring, confusing, dreams. It is revealed later that the reason she ran away with Eddie, a lowlife acquaintance, and was involved in the parking lot assault was because she had falsely accused her mother's boyfriend, her teacher, of having molested her. Thus ended her mother's romantic relationship and the man's job and reputation. It is apparent by then that Nora's image matters to her far more than her substance. Her woeful narration suggests that she is one who denies the truth, such as her husband's serial affairs; yet her purposeful attempts to hide her own actions signal that something in her account is amiss. Sure enough, as the elaborate tale unfolds, we understand that Nora is not interested in truth, but in burying it for others and even, alas, for herself. Her truths, so deeply submerged, are toxic enough that were she to comprehend them, she would not survive emotionally. The reader fails to grasp the depth of her sickness because the narrative, from Nora's point of view, implies her victimhood. We are encouraged to believe all is the fault of the wily, vicious Eddie, who is a psychopath; but as the book wears on through the labyrinthine entanglements of Nora's deceptions, we realize that her husband Ken is not the only uncaring creep in the book, nor is the distant, seemingly impersonal Oliver the business-like, self-serving Stephen, the duplicitous Robyn, nor even the nasty Eddie, it is also Nora herself -- the reserved, appropriate but always self-absorbed Nora, whose instinct for self-preservation trumps all those around her, while in fact, she remains protected to the last. The narrative alternates in point of view between Nora's machinations and Eddie's, and only near the end do we realize how much alike the two are. Both are calculated. Both seek their own self-gratification at any cost. Both hold onto their fragile senses of self, so deeply concealed by their own self-deceptions and feelings of victimization that they cannot bear to see themselves for what they truly are. Morris wants us to understand that "evil is contagious." It "thrives on denial." When the deranged Nora ends up a law student at the end of the novel, it is reminiscent of the teen murderess and kidnapper in Morris' first book, "Vanished." Similarly that character ends up on a national talk show, plying her false account to millions of unsuspecting viewers. For Morris, the observing social milieu is easily deceived, a result of its failure to see through the clever purveyors of deception: the teenage psychopath in "Vanished"; the con man, Omar Duvall, in "Songs in Ordinary Time," the predatory writer, Colin Mackey, in "A Dangerous Woman," and the weak, cruelly indifferent mother Irene Henry in "The Lost Mother." In "The Last Secret," it is Nora's denial and twisted psyche that wreak havoc on her surroundings. In the final analysis, Nora has successfully worn "a mask of sanity" since her false charges resulted in the high school teacher being fired. That action deceived her own mother as well as the authorities, but more pernicious is the fact that she concealed her malevolent nature from herself, and even as she later blithely pursues a law degree, mercifully protected by the newspaper's suppression of her complicity in the violence at her house, she persists in her deceptions. Never what she pretended to be, she is the epitome of the psychopath as Harvey M. Cleckley, author of "The Mask of Sanity" and authority on psychopaths, described the condition in 1964. The true psychopath is of above average intelligence, has no delusions, shows little apparent nervousness , is untruthful and insincere, as we realize Nora is toward Kay, for instance. The psychopath has poor judgment and fails to learn from experience, is egocentric and lacks the capacity to love. He/she has little insight and can have "fantastic anti-social behavior when drinking." The psychopath's sex life is poorly integrated and he/she experiences failure in attempting to follow any life plan. Throughout most of the book, engrossed by the complicated psychological revelations of Nora's family and associates, the reader falls prey to Nora's claim of being a victim. However, it eventually becomes apparent that she is an "unreliable narrator," that she has, in fact, lost touch with her children. Her son is an alcoholic, her daughter oblivious and unfocused, carrying on with a loser boyfriend. Her supposedly close friend, dying from cancer, is merely a blip on Nora's radar screen as she struggles to disguise her illicit past and current illegal and immoral actions, ostensibly intended to win back her husband. Later we realize that not only does she have a past laden with remorseless, terrible acts, but that she is presently in the process of an elaborate cover up even as she plays on the sympathy of all who surround her. Says Nora, in her one partial glimpse into her lack of authenticity, "I've lived my whole life trying to keep from myself what I am." That acknowledgement might have been the beginning of a long journey to sanity had she sought help. Instead she is reassured by the priest, her advisor, when he comments, "We're all hiding something." So she persists in her diabolical manipulations until it is too late for her and her children to extricate themselves from the deception governing their lives. An alcoholic, her son Drew has already learned to deny his insights into the toxicity of their family life. Nora's denial of her true nature is such strong armor that she can admit without feeling remorse that Robyn, her husband's paramour, didn't deserve her fate of being crippled by Eddie. She observes of her former friend: "All she ever wanted was to love and be loved," perhaps a projection of Nora's own lost hopes before her personality solidified. Concealed by her words is the fact that Robyn could have been saved from her painful injuries if Nora had called the police rather than hesitating. Nora wanted Eddie dead so her secret would be preserved; she killed him, not because he assaulted Robyn, but because Drew could have come in at any moment and discovered the truth. Ken knows she is complicit in Robyn's injury, but sex addict and superficial person that he is, all he wants is to go on with his life sans Nora. The book is a sordid saga of life on the edge, lived by unscrupulous, damaged, and dangerous people. Morris implies that the enemy is among us, and it is important for people to be vigilant in their daily lives. One assumes she wants us to value honesty in our personal relationships so that our children don't grow up to be misfits and murderers, the unacknowledged fate of those deprived of love and stable family ties. Yes, Mary McGarry Morris has a keen eye for evil, and the vision is frightening and informative as no one else today could wrought as cleverly. One has to go back to Dostoyevsky to see dark characters portrayed so well and true. Finally, it is the "last" secret, depicted subtly enough that most Amazon reviewers missed it, that is most important to the novel's narrative thrust. When the reader acknowledges that it is Nora's inability to look within herself for the truths of her life that damns her beyond grace of any sort, it is terribly upsetting, to say the least. Nora's sorry, tawdry story will play out, and none in her circle will be the wiser. As the old bard would say, hers is a "tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Morris could have edited out many subplots and asides to have a leaner, more satisfying novel. However, her emphasis on the heavy weight of denial on the human psyche is as insightful as it gets. Any kind of denial is a shroud of one's own making, for sure. Yes, denial IS evil, and yes, it IS contagious. Marjorie Meyerle Colorado Writer Author, Bread of Shame"Bread of Shame," a novel
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