Last Post: A Novel of Suspense

By Robert Barnard

Book Overview

A mysterious envelope arrives on Eve McNabb's doorstep soon after she has buried her mother, a woman who kept many secrets. The puzzling letter inside this envelope hints at an illicit passion between... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 141655940X
• ISBN13: 9781416559405
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Unusual Mystery

Robert Barnard has long written mystery novels that are almost better as novels than as mysteries. Here he does both superbly. He continues to push the mystery form beyond genre boundaries. Instead of the usual Agatha-Christie style Cozy Mystery, with its set characters, all equally under suspicion, Barnard here goes more toward the Raymond Chandler mode. His heroine, Eve McNabb, starts pulling a loose thread in her life, and ends up finding shocking things about her mother, her father, her hometown, all the figures of respectability and authority of her childhood. This eventually leads to quite a tangled murder. The end is doubly shocking, and sudden.

Barnard Is At It Again, Irony Intact

Robert Barnard, age 71, is one of the cleverest and best of Britain's mystery writers, and he is now out with his fortieth entry. Eve's mother has just died and the mother seems to have had secrets in her past, and is her father really dead as her mother had told her? The story involves alternative lifestyles and interracial love affairs. A frequent reader and aficionado of Barnard's work, I get the feeling that he could toss off these works in his sleep. They seem effortless and are so smoothly fashioned that they make for easy reading. They are uncomplicated, straightforward narratives. He always has a flock of interesting characters, many of them venal, sly, misleading, and mean-spirited. He likes to delve into the "cherished hatreds" of older people. He likes oddballs and eccentrics. As he and Ruth Rendell get older, they seem to fasten more on the psychology of seniors. He loves British pubs, tea time, and through his books one gains insights into British society, politics, class and caste, and social mores. Buy a bloke a couple of pints, and you may get more than you bargained for. A good scene: For information Eve is priming two of her dad's old friends with pints of bitter and pub grub. One of the informants skedaddles after two pints; Eve finds him cagey and slimy. One moral that Barnard espouses in his surprise endings (real twists) is that what conventionally are thought of as human frailties, weaknesses, and flaws will come out in the end no matter what. Wit, satire, irony, and humor are never far from Barnard's mind. This book is a series of character studies: people can lead secret lives, and sometimes too much probing can lead to unhappiness, disappointments and the incitement of murder.

"All she wanted to get at was the truth."

In Robert Barnard's "Last Post," teacher and headmistress May McNabb dies at the age of sixty-seven after succumbing to breast cancer. Until her retirement, May had been a beloved and much respected figure at the Blackfield Road Primary School in Crossley. May lived alone, but she enjoyed a cordial relationship with her grown daughter, Eve. The two women got together on weekends and they communicated regularly by telephone and mail. While going through her late mother's post (most of them brief condolence notes addressed to her), Eve picks up an envelope with no return address. A woman named Jean, who obviously has no idea that May has died, writes "We were the most wonderful pair, May; two people who had to come together because physically and mentally, we made a complete whole...." Eve is shocked to learn that her mother may have had a romantic relationship with a woman. Suddenly, Eve is not so sure that she really knew her mother. What other secrets had May been keeping from her? Eve wonders why May revealed so little about Eve's father, John, other than telling her that he died. After thinking things over, Eve decides to spend some time learning more about May and John. She investigates her father's professional life (he was a newspaper cartoonist) and speaks to several of her late mother's colleagues to get more insight into her personality. In the course of her inquiries, Eve encounters Detective Constable Omkar Rani, a married man nine years her junior, to whom she is instantly attracted. She also discovers that May had purposely withheld vital information from her. Eve's curiosity has unintended consequences; stirring up facts and feelings from long ago leads to murder. "Last Post" is talky and not particularly exciting or suspenseful. Nevertheless, it is an engrossing work of psychological fiction in which Barnard explores a number of themes: How important are family ties to our happiness and our sense of identity? Under what circumstances might it better not to uncover details from the past? Why do some people decide to "live a lie"? By the time Eve finishes navigating the muddy waters of her parents' marriage, she is shocked to learn how easily we can be deceived by those we trust.

Excellent suspense thriller

In the town of Crossley in Yorkshire, England Eve McNabb has just come home from viewing her late mother May prior to the funeral. Eve knows her mom was adored by her students and their parents, which makes her grief a bit easier. Eve has a ton of condolence letters to peruse and respond to; but when she opens one from a stranger named Jean, she is stunned as she insists she and her mom had an affair. Her not so subtle implication shakes the mourning woman to her core. Although she knew her mother was a very private person, Eve wonders why she never questioned her mom about her father John McGrath who disappeared in Australia without an apparent warning as far she knows to her late mom. Needing to know what happened when she was two, Eve interrogates everyone she assumes knew Meg and John back then including former headmistress Evelyn Southwick when her mom was a deputy working under her. Her need to know sends Eve to Australia to meet her father whom she forgives once she hears his side of the breakup. She is called back to England by the police who believe that Eve has information from her inquiries that could help them on an investigation in which Evelyn was murdered. Renowned for his suspense thrillers filled with surprising but plausible twists, Robert Barnard uses master magician misdirection to lure the readers down the wrong path so that the connections that seem evident turn out to be not so obvious. Eve is a fully developed protagonist who grieves at the same time her image of her beloved mom has been tattered yet she needs to know the truth if she is to gain any closure. Her inquisitiveness makes this family suspense drama entertaining. Harriet Klausner