Is there an audiobook of The Last Thing He Told Me?

Yes. The Last Thing He Told Me has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Rebecca Lowman.

How long is the The Last Thing He Told Me audiobook?

The The Last Thing He Told Me audiobook runs 9 hr 4 min.

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave book cover for the Book of the Day thriller book review

Our score

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Last Thing He Told Me free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDMay 2021

Genres

Fiction Thriller Women's Fiction

Themes

Stepparenting and chosen familyWitness protection and stolen identityA marriage built on omissionsGrief and inherited secrets

The Last Thing He Told Me

Name: The Last Thing He Told Me
Price: 13.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Laura Dave

Laura Dave

A kid from down the dock hands Hannah Hall a folded note in her husband's handwriting: protect her. Owen is gone, his company's CEO is under arrest, and the her in question is a sixteen-year-old stepdaughter who cannot stand her. Laura Dave's suspense novel runs on a teenager's half-remembered childhood and a stepmother who refuses to leave.

The Review

Our take

A girl from down the dock knocks on Hannah Hall's door in Sausalito and hands her a folded note. Two words in her husband's handwriting. Protect her. Within a day the FBI has arrested Owen's boss, federal agents are on Hannah's houseboat, a duffel bag of cash has turned up in a sixteen-year-old's locker, and the man Hannah married a year ago has stopped existing in every record anyone can pull. Dave sets all of this up in about forty pages and then does something smarter than accelerate. She sends two people who dislike each other to Austin, Texas, and makes them talk.

The investigation is a memory. Bailey was four or five and remembers a wedding: a church, a football stadium roaring somewhere nearby, a dress in some shade of orange, a man who took her for pancakes. That is the entire lead. Hannah and Bailey work it like detectives with nothing but a mood board, walking Austin looking for a building that matches a child's impression of one, and Dave keeps the tension in the right place. Every fragment Bailey recovers costs her something, because each one confirms that her father built her a life out of edits.

Dave writes plain and moves fast. Chapters run three or four pages. The one real drag is Hannah's interiority: her flashbacks to meeting Owen circle the same handful of moments, and by the fourth pass through their courtship the reader is well ahead of her. The Austin scenes have no such problem. Hannah is a woodturner, and Dave uses the craft sparingly and well, mostly as a way of showing a woman who is used to reading grain to figure out where a thing will split.

Why you should read

Domestic suspense with a warm center
Stepfamily stories that refuse easy bonding
Short chapters and a two-sitting pace
Viewers of the adaptation who want the original

What to expect

Plain, quick prose in very short chapters
Memory-hunting instead of chase scenes
Flashbacks that circle the same ground
An ending readers genuinely argue about

Then the last chapter arrives and does exactly what the note asked for, which is not at all the same as what a thriller usually promises. Dave honors her setup and refuses the reunion. Some readers close the book furious. The choice is deliberate, it is seeded from the first page, and it turns a missing-husband plot into a story about a woman deciding to be somebody's mother. Sixteen-year-olds in fiction rarely get treated this seriously. Bailey is prickly, unfair, and entirely convincing, and the last thing Owen told Hannah turns out to have been an instruction she was always going to follow.

Reviewed by Quinn · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Last Thing He Told Me free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Last Thing He Told Me?: Yes. The Last Thing He Told Me has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Rebecca Lowman.
Listen to The Last Thing He Told Me free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the The Last Thing He Told Me audiobook?: The The Last Thing He Told Me audiobook runs 9 hr 4 min.
How much does The Last Thing He Told Me cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $13.99, Paperback $9.75, Hardcover $14.28. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is The Last Thing He Told Me about?: A girl from down the dock knocks on Hannah Hall's door in Sausalito and hands her a folded note. Two words in her husband's handwriting. Protect her. Within a day the FBI has arrested Owen's boss, federal agents are on Hannah's houseboat, a duffel bag of cash has turned up in a sixteen-year-old's…
Is The Last Thing He Told Me worth reading?: We scored The Last Thing He Told Me 4.5 out of 5. A kid from down the dock hands Hannah Hall a folded note in her husband's handwriting: protect her. Owen is gone, his company's CEO is under arrest, and the her in question is a sixteen-year-old stepdaughter who cannot stand her. Laura Dave's suspense novel runs on a teenager's…