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The Last Kid Left

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

When a scandalous small-town crime goes viral, a teen girl takes center stage in the story of a twenty-first-century Puritan witch hunt

The Last Kid Left begins when a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl. The police find two bodies in the trunk. Nineteen-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder, and after details of the crime rip across the Internet, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis—a sheltered teen who's been off the grid until now, her first romance coinciding with her first cell phone—is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not.

Emily and Nick are not the only ones whose lives come unmoored. A retired police officer latches on to the case. Nick's alcoholic mother is thrust into an unfamiliar role. A young journalist who left her hometown behind is pulled into the fray. And Emily's father, the town sheriff, is finally forced to confront a monstrous secret.

The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, an expertly portrayed account of tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it's the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that's more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it's the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 3, 2017
      When Martin Krug, chief of the Eagle Mount, N.J., PD and the hero of Baldwin’s well-crafted mystery, responds to an automobile accident call, he doesn’t expect to find 20-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. in the driver’s seat with two dead bodies in the trunk. Nick confesses to the murders, but the sheriff has his doubts. Since the murders happened at the victims’ house in Claymore, N.H., Krug has no jurisdiction. When Krug retires a few days later, he decides to join the Claymore public defender in charge of proving Nick’s innocence. The suspicious connection between Claymore’s sheriff and Nick—namely, that the sheriff’s daughter, Emily, is Nick’s girlfriend—is just the beginning of a newsworthy scandal, to which the leaking on the internet of nude photos of Emily, meant to comfort Nick in jail, adds fuel. Baldwin (You Lost Me There) relegates the actual murder and investigation to the background, but readers who like plenty of character analysis in their crime fiction will be satisfied. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Xe Sands gives a disarming performance of Baldwin's audiobook, which melds a crime story with a larger observation of group behavior. In a small resort town, a doctor and his wife are found dead in the back of a crashed vehicle. Nick, the driver, confesses. The investigator suspects there's more to the story. Things get complex; Nick's girlfriend, 16-year-old Emily, faces public shaming after rumors of sexting images circulate, fueling the lurid nature of the story within the community. A reporter attempts to capture the truth of the events, but her work is overshadowed by the desire for more sensational details. Sands provides a clear, laid-back narration that at first seems incongruent with the tone but ultimately benefits a story of youth and tragedy. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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