The Last Talk with Lola Faye [Hardcover]

Thomas H. Cook (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2010

Middling historian Lucas Paige visits St. Louis to give a sparsely attended reading—nothing out of the ordinary. Except among the yawning attendees is someone he did not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the “other woman” he has long blamed for his father’s murder decades earlier.

 

Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. Slowly but surely, the hotel bar dissolves around them and they are transported back to the tiny southern town where this defining moment—a violent crime of passion—is turned in the light once more to reveal flaws in the old answers. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesn’t know. And what he doesn’t know can hurt him. Trapped in an increasingly intense emotional exchange, and with no place to go save back into his own dark past, Luke struggles to gain control of an ever more threatening conversation, to discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after—before it is too late.

 

A taut literary thriller in the gothic tradition of Master of the Delta.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In this tightly coiled, intellectual drama, Cook (The Chatham School Affair) unwinds a marvelously tense story of belated redemption. While in St. Louis for a book tour, Luke Paige, a middle-aged writer of lackluster histories, agrees to meet with a long-forgotten acquaintance, the "little hayseed tramp" he believes triggered a bloody tragedy that befell his family decades earlier. The story alternates between Luke's recollections of his hometown; the "heady ambition" of the despicably cruel, contemptuous younger Luke, who wants to go to Harvard and gets swept up "in the lethal tide of [his] own grand dream"; and the numb, disillusioned academic who sits down for a drink with Lola Faye Gilroy. A vertiginous precipice eventually materializes in front of Luke, who must finally confront the true nature of his father’s heinous murder and its equally tragic aftermath. The younger Luke is without a doubt one of the more convincing modern villains, a single-minded overachiever devoured by raging oedipal loathing and equally consumed by narcissistic ambition."
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED

About the Author

THOMAS H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama. He has been nominated for Edgar Awards seven times in five different categories. He received the Best Novel Edgar, the Barry for Best Novel, and has been nominated for numerous other awards.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (July 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151014078
• ISBN-13: 978-0151014071
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #693,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

THOMAS H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, in 1947. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award seven times in five different categories. He received the best novel Edgar for The Chatham School Affair, the Martin Beck Award, the Herodotus Prize for best historical short story, and the Barry for best novel for Red Leaves, and has been nominated for numerous other awards.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rashômon Meets My Dinner With Andre, July 15, 2010

By 

E. Burian-Mohr "cornerstoregoddess" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last Talk with Lola Faye (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

The editorial review above, and the liner notes from which it is pulled, make this book out to be something that it is not - a taut gothic thriller asking the question: will Luke stop Lola Faye before it's too late? This, I think, is misleading.

The book takes a pivotal event in two people's lives (the murder of Luke's father/Lola Faye's employer) and looks at it from each of their perspectives, spinning back in time and gradually moving us forward. Thomas Cook does this very well. He is a skilled writer with deep insights into the darker side.

We see that what Luke believes about Lola Faye and his father's murder and his mother and perhaps no closer to the truth than what Lola Faye believes about the same people. The book is Rashômon-like in its structure: the same twisted tale seen from different points of view.

And it is a twisted tale. Despite the fact that the whole story is told as a conversation between two people in a St. Louis bar, the author draws you in and you are compelled to keep reading. While not a page-turner in the classic sense, the book will keep you turning the pages, trying to find the truth in each person's truth.

An insightful compelling read.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A REMARKABLE STORY OF REGRET AND REDEMPTION, August 7, 2010

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last Talk with Lola Faye (Hardcover)

Poetic...dark...suspenseful...satisfying. For this reader each of these words aptly describe award winning author Thomas H. Cook's beautifully written novel THE LAST TALKWIHT LOLA FAYE. Reading it is a bit like watching an absorbing two person play as the story is revealed in a conversation between two characters - Lucas "Luke" Page and Lola Faye Gilroy.

Luke is a fair to middling professor and writer who has come to St. Louis to deliver a lecture at the Museum of the West. It's a dreary, wet December evening, and he doesn't anticipate much of a crowd - there seldom is at his lectures. However, the last person he expected or wanted to see was Lola Faye Gilroy, his father's mistress. Her husband had shot and killed his father, and then killed himself. All of this in Glenville, Alabama, a tired Southern town where his father ran a variety store.

Now, Glenville was not your pretty little town but a place pockmarked by abandoned storefronts "their empty windows staring like blinded eyes onto deserted sidewalks....and a windowless library housed in the basement of the police department." Plus "a trailer park perpetually pulsing in the light of a police cruiser, diesel trucks sitting like exhausted mastodons in red-dirt driveways." It was a place Luke couldn't wait to leave - of course, he would leave because he was considered to be "the smartest kid in town." As far as he was concerned Glenville limited his intellectual prowess; he believed that some day he would write a great novel. Yet here he was some years later addressing a sparse audience, and unable to turn Lola Faye down when she urged him to have a drink with her.

As one drink turns into several and their conversation moves on Luke becomes introspective, looking back upon events, mistakes he had made, remembering Fitzgerald saying "you lose yourself in pieces." He wonders if his first small deceit was where the first piece of him had fallen away.

Luke had believed he knew all about his father, an uninspired man who wasn't even able to run a small store efficiently, and left his mother alone for trysts with Lola Faye. He was a man Luke was never able to please, Yet, as the story progresses we find out just how little he really knows about his family or himself.

THE LAST TALK WITHLOLA FAYE is a landmark novel, a story of regret and redemption that will remain with you long after closing the last page.

- Gail Cooke

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent and Dramatic Story, August 2, 2010

By 

Jeanne Anderson (Swartz Creek, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last Talk with Lola Faye (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This story involves the meeting of Luke Paige and Lola Faye Gilroy; years after an event in their lives that changed them and left them as they are, broken. It was a supposed murder - suicide. Luke's father, Lola's husband respectively.

Luke has become a Professor at a Boston College and a writer of small books on history. He is at a reading and signing of his book in St. Louis when Lola Faye shows up after all this time. They go for a drink and to talk and oh does the talk turn dark and mysterious concerning that time when the murder took place.

Luke felt he was above most people due to his intelligence, he went to Harvard. He felt Lola was involved with his father, who he thought was such a simple dull person. Luke's mother encouraged him to better himself and read anything he could get his hands on as she did. They lived in rural Alabama where not much happened to their people.

Luke, in talking to Lola Faye, returns to his youth and the demons he carries with him. This story twists and turns as they discuss all the so called facts and possible lies of the events that happened that day in Alabama to the conclusion which is so sad but incouraging for the future of these people.

I have read other Thomas H. Cook books and they always entertain. "Breakheart Hill" was the first I read, much like this one, very good indeed.