Emily Arsenault of Shelburne Falls is no stranger to the dark side of fiction.
She has written seven novels of mystery and suspense, but her latest, “The Last Thing I Told You,” is perhaps the darkest. “Last Thing” is a disconcerting read that nevertheless keeps the reader involved.
Arsenault divides her novel between two narrators. Nadine is a young woman remembered in her Connecticut community for a violent act against a teacher in her youth.
As an adult, she has returned to her hometown and gets in touch with the therapist who treated her for several years when she was a teenager. At the beginning of the novel, that therapist is found dead — and Nadine goes on the run.
The other narrator is Henry, the detective assigned to investigate the therapist’s murder. Like Nadine, Henry is haunted by an incident in the past.
Several years earlier, he arrested a killer on a rampage in a local retirement community. The community views him as a hero, but he can’t help feeling that if he had acted differently, fewer people would have been killed.
Arsenault cleverly releases only a little bit of information at a time about Nadine, Henry and the dead therapist. Most crucially, the reader is never quite certain whether Nadine killed her therapist or merely found his dead body.
Both Nadine and Henry spend much of their narration working through history. The world sees Nadine as a troubled, violent person. Nadine tends to see herself that way as well. She examines her past and present in an effort to define herself.
Henry’s job as a detective involves sorting through the past. Who were the therapist’s patients (not an easy thing to determine, in light of privacy laws), and what might have led one of them to commit murder?
He zeroes in on Nadine fairly quickly — but like the reader, Henry is never quite sure whether the young woman is a killer, a witness or a victim.
“The Last Thing I Told You” takes a risk by making its central character, Nadine, unsympathetic for much of the book. The risk pays off when, like Henry, the reader discovers moments in which Nadine is vulnerable.
The causes of Nadine’s violence in the past and possible violence in the present are never entirely clear.
Arsenault seems to be making the point that the causes of violence may never be easy to define. Nevertheless, people have to learn to deal with the results of that violence — as Henry and Nadine eventually do.
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com.