Review: The Last Girl to Die

A crown of seaweed for the dead. Helen Fields introduces us to the isle of Mull and Sadie Levesque, a Canadian private eye who’s introduced to a world where the ways of paganism meet modernity.

Initially Sadie is brought to this isle at the behest of an American family, new residents to the island, to locate their missing daughter. Within the opening chapter Sadie finds the girl naked, dead, and crowned with seaweed in one of the islands caves. Sadie, an expert in tracking troubled teens, suddenly finds herself tracking a murderer on an island where people aren’t keen on outsiders ordinarily, much less outsiders accusing them of murder.

I’ll confess prior to this I had not heard of Helen Fields or her work. I was travelling home from Belfast when her book caught my eye. On the eight-hour ferry I didn’t put the book down once.

Fields style of writing invites the reader to experience the island as Sadie does, an outsider seeing a new and isolated community for the first time. The cliché of the abandoned village at the end of the world is discarded when we’re introduced to the town folk, particularly the teenagers, whom Sadie relies on to unravel the mystery of the dead girl. We’re introduced to a very personable, faulted as they may be, people who seek safety in their community and the desperation that arises from alarming circumstances.

From start to finish the reader is led on a merry chase. We’re directed all over the island and begin to suspect everyone Sadie meets at least once. A dubious alibi here, a questionable character of ideals there. We’re never quite sure who to believe or what motivates the inhabitants of the island. The bent coppers, the witchy women, and the dark histories of those who came before all create a tangled web for Sadie to unravel. The characters all seem to believe in their own facades as though their masks offer them some protection from the events that unfold during Sadie’s investigation. As Sadie begins to lift the facades, we begin to find there are more wolves in this flock than we realised.

As I said already, the tension that Fields builds kept the pages rolling. I was unable to put the book down and finished it in one sitting for I simply could not in good conscious close this book less the murderer escape whilst my attention was elsewhere. The ending had me quite literally on the edge of my seat. The distress Fields manages to put into words is uncomfortably palpable and I dare anyone who reads this book to tell me they could sit still through the final chapters.

Fields is a master of her craft, it's been a long time since I was so enthralled much longer since I was able to finish one so quickly and exceitedly. She has singlehandedly reignited my passion for literature and I will forever be grateful to her and her wonderful way with words. Pick up this book, better yet pick up two and give one to a friend for the only thing better than finishing this book is watching your friends trying to figure out how it ends.