The Last House on Needless Street

Darren recommended this book to me, and it’s a good job he did because when I was about three-quarters of the way in it felt like the plot was disintegrating into utter trash and nonsense and I wasn’t at all sure it was worth finishing it. Except Darren hates books with crappy endings so I knew it must all manage to tie up somehow and make sense and yes, I was right, and it did, and in the end I liked it and thought it was pretty clever.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers but it’s clear that some kind of unreliable narrator situation is happening from the start. One of the narrators, and the resident of the last house on Needless Street, is Ted, who was once one of the suspects in a nearby missing girl case. Another narrator is his cat Olivia, I’m never very taken with cat narrators in books but I went along with it and she rather delightfully refers to all humans as “teds”. Another is Dee, the older sister of the missing girl. A lot of the mystery is trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. It’s more of a psychological thriller than a crime novel I guess. You have numerous pieces of the jigsaw and some of them sort of fit together but you’re sure some of them belong to a different puzzle, and some of them look like they picture some object but might turn out to be something else entirely.

Would I recommend it? Yes, it all came together in the end and I learnt something new. My partway through misgivings about it maybe point to the pacing not being quite right for me but it was cleverly pieced together and I very much enjoyed the bit where the picture came into focus. I’m not sure there weren’t holes in the plot, but it’s kind of hard to tell, and even if there were I don’t think it would ruin the essence of the book.