The Last House on Needless Street

I’ve heard a lot of things about this book, both good and bad. I’m really glad that I gave this book a chance. 

We follow Ted, Olivia the cat and Lauren (Ted’s daughter) in their own chapters. Lauren seems very angry at Ted and lashes out at him a lot, meaning that he doesn’t let her out of the house to play, sends her away to school or grounds her a lot of the time. Olivia despises Lauren and runs away and hides when Lauren is around and only comes out when she has gone again. Ted tries to raise Lauren right despite her anger towards him, but he has his own issues and quite often will disappear into the woods when Lauren is gone for a few days. 

We also have a few chapters from the perspective of Dee. She is trying to track down her sister who went missing years ago when she was only six years old. She has grown tired of waiting for the police to track her down. She gets information given to her which makes her begin to suspect Ted, so she moves in to the abandoned house next door to see if she can find out where her sister, Lulu, went that fateful day. 

However, nothing in this book is as it seems. I had an inkling about what was happening about a third of the way into the book, but Catriona Ward’s writing made me second and third guess myself. I ended up with two theories at one point, and although one of them was correct, it wasn’t the one that I gravitated towards until the last 100 pages of the book. It kept me confused enough that I wanted to read on to understand what was happening, but not so confused that I wanted to put it down and walk away. 

I enjoyed the writing and the mystery of this book far more than I thought I would. I look forward to reading more of Catriona Ward’s books in the future.