THE LAST THING I TOLD YOU
By Emily Arsenault
William Morrow
emilyarsenault.com
A psychiatrist nearing retirement is found bludgeoned to death in his office 10 days before Christmas, a rare homicide in the blandly pleasant suburban Connecticut town of Campion. But when detective Henry Preacher begins investigating, he discovers the crime might be linked to some past violence in town — including an incident involving him.
And Henry, one of the two principal characters in Emily Arsenault’s new mystery, “The Last Thing I Told You,” wonders if the killing of Dr. Mark Fabian could be connected to another violent act committed almost 20 years ago by his former high school classmate, Nadine Raines. Nadine, it turns out, has just come back to town for the first time in years — and it also turns out she’s a former patient of Dr. Fabian.
Arsenault, of Shelburne Falls, is the author of six previous mysteries/psychological thrillers, including the YA title “The Leaf Reader.” And like her other books, “The Last Thing I Told You” simmers at a low but steady boil, turning on dialogue, atmosphere and slowly-revealed details rather than dramatic events or horror.
As Arsenault said during a Gazette interview last year, “When my husband reads my manuscripts, he always says, ‘Why don’t you put some more action in it?’ ”
Told alternately in short chapters through the first-person voices of Nadine and Henry, her new novel explores the troubled lives and undercurrents that can be found even in upscale suburbs like Campion, a town Henry describes as “lined with cute front gardens and glutted with giant SUVs zipping from gymnastics to soccer to SAT prep.” He’s a townie who finds himself still in Campion, by his own admission, from inertia as much as anything.
He’s also troubled by the memory of a terrible crime in town from five years earlier, a mass shooting at a nursing home in which 10 people were killed. Henry is a hero to many in Campion for taking down the shooter, Johnny Streeter, who’s now serving a life sentence in prison. But Henry, who was wounded himself in the exchange of gunfire, now often finds himself wondering how he can protect his wife and young twin daughters if random violence ever comes their way.
Nadine, now a nurse, is a damaged soul as well; part of her narration is delivered as a monologue to the now-dead Dr. Fabian, recalling the therapy sessions she was compelled to take with him after she committed a violent act as a teenager. Nadine was and is a smart person, a good student in high school and college, but she’s also manipulative, secretive and convinced that deep down there’s still something wrong with her.
“I knew that my capacity for normalcy was limited; all it had to do was sustain itself until its prescribed date,” she says at one point.
As Henry investigates Dr. Fabian’s killing, he discovers that shortly before his death, the psychiatrist had pulled out the files of two of his old patients: Nadine and Johnny Streeter. Is there some long-ago connection between Nadine and Streeter? And does that explain why Nadine apparently came back to Fabian’s office just shortly before he was found dead, and why she’s apparently fled town again, just as she did 18 years ago after graduating from an alternative high school?
Or did one of the doctor’s other patients have a grudge against him? It seems he might have had a few things he tried to hide, like guilt about the ineffectiveness of his therapy.
For Henry, who had once sat behind Nadine in their social studies classroom, Nadine is looking more and more like a “person of interest.” But as Nadine’s narration explores her troubled past — the suicide of her father when she was 10, her tenuous relationship with her mother and her stepfather — Arsenault throws in more developments that keep the reader guessing and the pages turning, while reminding one that people’s secrets and motives are rarely simple.
As one reviewer puts it, “ ‘The Last Thing I Told You’ is an expertly woven tale of dark obsession and blood secrets. With her sharp eye and clear prose, Arsenault gives us a finely dissected portrait of a disturbed young woman as well as a tense thriller that defies categorization.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.