THE LAST TO SEE HER
Author: Courtney Evan Tate
ISBN: 9780778309413
Publication Date: December 15, 2020
Publisher: MIRA Books
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Book Summary:
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Courtney
Evan Tate's The Last to See Her (MIRA; 12/29) is a twisty,
fast-paced domestic suspense about sisters, secrets and betrayal--for fans of
B.A. Paris and Riley Sager.
Genevieve, a writer, is about to finalize her
divorce from her cheating husband Todd. So when her sister Meg, an ambitious
physician, has a convention to attend in New York City, she invites Gen along
to celebrate her return to single life. It will be a perfect sisters' getaway
in the big city! But things go awry when, on their first evening at the hotel,
Gen decides to take a late night walk and disappears without a trace.
Eventually she is officially declared a missing person.
Suspicion soon falls on her sister Meg, who was
the last person to see her.
Through twists and turns, it is revealed that
Meg has been sleeping with her brother-in-law Todd... And then there is a
question of a newly purchased insurance policy that just has just gone into
effect before Gen’s disappearance. Both Todd and Meg deny any knowledge of it.
But has an actual crime been committed? Can it
be proven? And if so, who is really the guilty one?
Excerpt Teaser:
Genevieve
tipped the courier and set the certified letter on the coffee table.
She knew what it was. She’d been waiting for it for
almost a week.
Every day, she’d wondered, Will it be today?
And each day it wasn’t.
Until today.
Nervous energy buzzed through her fingers and toes,
tingling through her veins, like ants scurrying in a thousand directions. She
paced for a minute, stopping at the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring at the
magnificent cityscape lining the horizon. Buildings burst through the hazy
pollution, their tips scraping the clouds.
People far below her were bustling here and there,
quick to walk, slow to linger. They had things to do, places to be, and she
didn’t.
Not anymore.
She
ripped open the envelope, pulling the banded documents out, scanning through
the words, hunting for the official stamps and signatures that declared this
an official act of the court.
They were
all there.
This was
real.
It was
finally happening.
She
focused her gaze on the words before her.
Honestly,
they were simple.
The
black-and-whiteness of them was stark and startling. There were no gray areas,
no areas open to interpretation.
They
reduced the last ten years of her life into a handful of legal phrases and
technical terms. Incompatible differences associated
with adultery, marriage dissolution and
absolute divorce.
She stared at the words.
Soon, she would be absolutely divorced. She
just had to sign the papers.
It had only taken six months of her life to iron out
the details. To separate all of their worldly possessions into two camps, his
and hers, to figure out who got what. Divorcing a lawyer was the only thing
worse than being married to one. No matter that he was the one in err, because
he repeatedly fucked someone else, he was out for blood and it took months to
sort it all out.
But thank God no children were involved.
That’s what people kept saying, like it was a good
thing or a blessing.
But if she’d had a child, she wouldn’t be all alone,
and someone would still love her.
She
felt like she was floundering. For so long, she’d put all of her energy into a
man who hadn’t deemed her worthy to stay faithful to. That had done something
to her self-confidence. Something terrible. It wounded her in places she hadn’t
known she had, and now she had to figure out who she was without him.
She wasn’t
Genevieve Tibault anymore, one half of a whole. She was Genevieve McCready
again, and what was Genevieve McCready going to do now, now that she had to
stand alone?
She pushed
herself off the couch and ran water in her coffee cup. It was a habit Thad had
taught her. He hated it when the cups developed coffee rings. She stared at the
running water, and then set her cup down.
She didn’t
have to do what he wanted anymore. If she wanted coffee rings or tea rings or
any kind of fucking rings, she could have them.
It was an
epiphany.
She was
her own person again. It had been so long since she was a me instead
of a we.
She looked around, at the condo she had fought so
hard for…the marble floors that they couldn’t agree on—she’d wanted slate, he’d
wanted marble—at the modern light fixtures that he’d gotten his way on, at
even the tan wall colors. She’d wanted gray.
Why had she even wanted this place?
It was all Thad, and none of Genevieve.
A sense of exuberance, a strange jubilation, welled
up in her as she searched online for a realtor and then dialed the phone.
Bubbles of excitement swelled in her belly as she
arranged a time for the realtor to come see the place.
And then again, as she stared at a map.
Unlike Thad, someone who had spent years building up
his legal practice and honing his networking skills in this one city, she could
work from anywhere.
She wrote novels.
She could
work in Antarctica if she wanted to.
She didn’t want
to, but she could.
She already had a plan. She knew where she was
going, and what she was doing. She just had to have the courage to do it.
She picked up the phone and called her only sister,
Meghan.
“Meg, I’m moving home.”
Her sister paused. “Home as in…?”
“Cedarburg.” There was a long pregnant pause now.
“Um. Why would you want to move back to Wisconsin?
You haven’t lived there in…”
“In eighteen years. Since I left for college. Yes.”
“But…why?”
“I don’t know,” Gen said honestly. “I just feel a
need to get back to my roots. I love Chicago, but the traffic and the noise…”
She stared out from her twentieth floor windows again. Even from up here, even
though the vehicles looked like Matchbox cars, she could still hear the
honking. “This feels like Thad. I want to feel like me.”
“There’s nothing there,” Meg said carefully.
“Nothing but fields and cold and—”
“And friendly people,” Gen interrupted. “And our
parents, and familiarity, and open spaces, and distance from Thad.”
“But I won’t be there,” Meg reminded her gently.
“I’m not moving back. I think you need to be near me, Gen. You need a support
system. Divorce is no joke.”
“I know that,” Gen said patiently. “I’m the one
living it. You’re still with your Prince Charming and point five children
living the American Dream, and I’m the one sitting in an empty condo.”
She fought to keep the
bitterness out of her voice, as she compared Meg’s bustling, messy home to her
own stark and empty condo in her mind’s eye.
“I’ll tell
Joey that you’re counting him as a point five,” Meg chuckled.
“Well,
he’s only five, so it’s fitting. I mean, honestly. He’s not a whole person
yet.”
They
laughed again, and then Meg sobered up.
“Is this
really something you want to do?”
Gen
nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”
Meg took a
big breath. “Well, let’s do it, then. I’ll help you with your condo, and
finding a moving company, and looking online for a house there, and hell’s
bells, we’ve got a lot to do!”
“You don’t
have to help with all that…” Gen trailed off, but Meg interrupted with their
life-long pact.
“Sisters
forever,” she decreed. They’d used that pact since they were kids. Whenever one
didn’t want to do something, the other would remind them “sisters forever,” and
they would concede.
Gen
realized she wasn’t going to get away with not letting Meg get her hands in all
the new plans.
“Sisters
forever,” she agreed.
“But
first, you promised to go to my convention with me,” Meg reminded her.
Gen
hesitated.
“Don’t
tell me you forgot. New York City? Spa days, shopping—you need a new wardrobe,
sis—and nights on the town. You promised.”
Gen paused again, and Meghan cajoled, “Pleassssse.
We need this. You need this. It can be your divorce party.”
“Okay,” Gen found herself saying. “Fine. I’ll still
come.”
Her sister squealed and Gen hung up before Meg could get too
excited. She was moving away from everything she’d known for over a decade.
Even though the world seemed unsettled and uncertain, for the first time in at
least five years, she felt at peace.
Excerpted from The Last
to See Her by Courtney Evan Tate, Copyright © 2020 by
Lakehouse Press, Inc. Published
by MIRA Books
Author Bio:
Courtney Evan Tate is the nom de plume (and
darker side) of the New York Times and USA Today
bestselling author Courtney Cole. As Courtney Evan Tate, she is the author of Such
Dark Things and I'll Be Watching You. Courtney grew up in rural
Kansas and now lives with her husband and kids in Florida, where spends her
days dreaming of new characters and storylines and surprising plot twists and
writing them beneath rustling palm trees. Visit her on Facebook or at courtneycolewriters.com
Social Links:
Twitter: @Court_Writes
Instagram: @CourtneyColeWrites
Facebook: @CourtneyColeWrites
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