The Night We Lost Him

• Author: Laura Dave
• Genre: Mystery/Thriller
• Publication Date: September 17, 2024
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Thank you to libro.fm for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am providing my honest opinion voluntarily.

Estranged siblings discover their father has been keeping a secret for over fifty years, one that may have been fatal…

Liam Noone was many things to many people. To the public, he was an exacting, self-made hotel magnate fleeing his past. To his three ex-wives, he was a loving albeit distant family man who kept his finances flush and his families carefully separated. To Nora, he was a father who often loved her from afar – notably a cliffside cottage perched on the California coast from which he fell to his death.   

The authorities rule the death accidental, but Nora and her estranged brother Sam have other ideas. As Nora and Sam form an uneasy alliance to unravel the mystery, they start putting together the pieces of their father’s past—and uncover a family secret that changes everything.

With Laura Dave’s trademark combination of soulful suspense and evocative family drama, The Night We Lost Him is a riveting page-turner with a heartbreaking final twist you’ll never see coming.

After the blockbuster hype that surrounded The Last Thing He Told Me, and how I watched the show before I even realized that it was a book, there was no way I’d miss out on this one. I was able to get an advanced copy of this audiobook and completely avoid the long library wait list.

To start with, the audiobook is narrated by Julia Whelan, who I could listen to all day. She is one of my all-time favorite narrators, and does a wonderful job with the story. She breathes life into Nora, and makes her into a believable person that jumps off the page.

Along with the narrator, another thing that I love which is featured in this book is wealthy families keeping secrets. The entire story hinges on a huge secret that the family patriarch was keeping from everyone. Liam worked his way up from the bottom to become a hotel magnate, yet his personal life wasn’t quite as successful as his professional one. He was divorced three times, and kept his families compartmentalized, so the half-siblings never grew up close.

Nora, the narrator, hears from one of her estranged brothers, Sam, who doesn’t believe that their father would ever fall from the cliff outside of his favorite cottage. He recruits Nora to his cause, and the two of them have to set their differences aside and work together to uncover clues about what their father was up to, and what really happened on that night their father died. Interspersed with the present-day search are chapters from Liam’s past, starting fifty years ago and moving up in time to the last year of his life.

Sometimes when it comes to audiobooks, I struggle keeping up with the story when it gets really complex. This can be the plot, especially in fantasy stories, or it can occur when there are a lot of characters in the story, and I found myself getting a little confused with the characters in the present day and the past, especially in the middle part of the story. It got a little easier for me to keep track of everyone as I kept listening, and the plot kept me hooked.

Overall, this was the kind of story that kept me listening intently for a full day. I figured out the twist in advance of the reveal, but it didn’t prevent me from enjoying the story at all. Dave keeps the story surprising with twists and turns, and I didn’t see most of them coming, aside from the big one. This is the kind of story you’ll enjoy if you like twisty, turny, suspenseful books, have enjoyed other books by Laura Dave, and like stories with plenty of family drama and secrets.

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