THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU

"Baltimore Heiress Bludgeoned to Death in Her Home"—and now the killer is after the dead woman's daughter.

"Only days ago, Kate had been mulling over what to get her mother for Christmas. She couldn't have known that instead of choosing a gift, she'd be picking out her casket." Unfortunately, things are about to get much worse. Immediately after the funeral, Kate receives a text. "You think you're sad now, just wait. By the time I’m finished with you, you'll wish you had been buried today." That same night, she finds three mice in her bathroom sink with their eyes gouged out, accompanied by another alarming message. "They all ran after a charming life / he took their eyes with a carving knife / Did you ever see such a beautiful sight / As three dead mice." Kate and her semi-estranged husband, Simon, hire round-the-clock security guards, since one thing these people have is plenty of money. Also Ivy League degrees, designer clothes, a nanny, a cook, a beach house, a foundation, and big, successful careers. Simon is an architect, and Kate is a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, or at least she's supposed to be—there's not a single detail that makes this feel believable, unless "she’d worked her butt off to get into med school and to ace the MCATs" counts. Maybe complaints about the money-porn aspect of the book seem picky, but the whodunit aspect, which is where it lives or dies, is not much more substantial. Suspicious details pile up so quickly against the various suspects that one never actually suspects them, and then so much backstory has to be shoehorned in at the last minute to support the solution to the puzzle that it's not very satisfying.

The two sisters who write as Constantine (The Last Mrs. Parrish, 2017) can do better than this.