Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger
In the grand tradition of “books with the word ‘girl’ in the title” this is a psychological thriller centered around independent but vulnerable women and mysterious dangerous men. Wren is young, beautiful, and wealthy, living in a Brooklyn brownstone and writing a popular advice column called “Dear Birdie.” Since the advice column is anonymously written, I couldn’t help but picture Cheryl Strayed as the protagonist. The three main plotlines center around her different aspects of her life: the one as the successful writer, the one as the survivor of a childhood tragedy, and the woman who is upset that she met the love of her life online and he ghosted her.
The last factoid is the crux of the plot, because soon after she realizes that “Adam” is never going to contact her again, a private investigator named Bailey shows up to talk to her. It seems that the man she knows as Adam has done this before, except that all the other women he dated (one of them his client’s daughter) disappeared. There’s immediate chemistry between Bailey and Wren (of course) but Wren isn’t sure if she can trust him, especially when she gets warnings from several people that Bailey is not as he seems.
This is the first novel I’ve read that was set during the pandemic, and it very much intrigued me because the possibilities for complications are high, but then the story got resolved before lockdown, so it felt like a squandered opportunity to ramp up the anxiety. Some people start wearing masks, and she references the wildfires in Australia, so we know it’s set in January 2020, but it never hits that surreal dystopian level that real life held for so many of us during that time.
As Wren and Bailey try to track down Adam, we learn more about Wren’s past, and why she has an imaginary friend named Robin who advises her sometimes. Wren ends up going back to the place she grew up, the place where the tragedy happened, which alarms her best friend.
There were things I liked in this novel, and things that didn’t work for me. I kind of liked the character of Wren, and her imaginary friend. I liked the character of Jax, and hoped that (like Jax’s mother) Wren and Jax would eventually come out as a couple, because seriously, everyone in the world needs a friend like Jax. Even though it was contrived, I didn’t mind the Bailey-Wren love angle.
What didn’t work for me was the Adam character. It was hard for me to believe that Wren still pined after him after he ghosted her. It was hard enough to believe that anyone would want to match with a guy who spouted poetry and used a blurry selfie as his profile pic. An advice columnist should know better than to mewl after a guy who literally stalks her and calls her up from an unlisted number and then hangs up without saying anything. When she finds out that “his apartment” is actually a vacation rental and his so-called corporation is a shell company that never existed, that’s when a normal person would realize that she was the victim of some kind of con.
What also didn’t work for me was the ending. At about the 75% mark is when it should have wrapped up and ended, with Wren either deciding that Adam was the guy for her and making it work or realizing he was bad news six ways from Sunday and giving him a hard pass. But that doesn’t happen. What happens is that Wren decides that she’s gonna lean into the stupid and do the worst possible thing she could do. So not only does the last quarter of the book just not happen without the main character going off the rails with idiocy, there are other things that don’t add up.
Like the real supposed identity/backstory of the bad guy. A guy who’s a die-hard environmentalist who wants to live off the land feels very incompatible with the kind of guy who spends $200 on a plain white tee because he’s classier than the rest of us (not a real example, but he was depicted as the kind of guy who always had the more expensive version of plain and simple looking goods.) If he’s so much more powerful than her, why does he need to drug her? If he’s going to bury her in a shallow grave, why does he have a bodybag? I mean, isn’t he an environmentalist? That plastic is not biodegradable, bro. Why did he want her land if he has his own? What good are solar panels if the house has no yard and is directly under trees in the woods? Why doesn’t the house have more than one exit? It felt like the story was a pretty good story and then the author shoved a surprise twist in. This, unfortunately, is a hallmark of the genre. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I think this was one of the cases where it just unnecessarily dragged out a story that should have ended much sooner.
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