Breakaway Books

Authored by Jason Rekulak; Published October 2024; Mystery

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

If you have been reading the news for the past couple months and are sick of reading about Elon Musk, I can’t recommend reading The Last One at the Wedding. It’s impossible not to read this one and think that he was the inspiration behind it all.

The Last One at the Wedding is the story of Frank, a tenured UPS driver whose daughter Maggie is getting married into an extremely wealthy family after a long estrangement from her father. Maggie calls Frank out of the blue to ask him to attend the wedding, but as soon as Frank meets his soon-to-be inlaws, he discovers that something is seriously amiss. The wedding week comes… and the bodies start dropping. I breezed through this one—it’s an engaging thriller—even as I found the characters to be less than enjoyable to read.

Frank is intended to be the good guy narrator here, a blue-collar worker who did his best to raise his daughter after his wife died. And most of the time, I felt exactly that intended sympathy, but by the end of the novel, it was difficult to avoid a level of annoyance toward him. Parents always see the best in their kids, but Frank’s level of naïveté verged on blindness. The author masterfully reveals piece by piece just how much Frank knew (and ignored) about Maggie’s character, her mentality on life, until the reader is agog at Frank’s failure to act. At the same time, to every other person in his life, Frank manages to come off as preachy and arrogant. It’s not a pleasant combination.

I was intrigued by the power dynamics the novel portrays—I admit that I started off on the assumption that Maggie’s fiance, the rich heir to his father’s kingdom, would be the problem. But instead, it’s Maggie’s cunning, Maggie’s ruthlessness, Maggie’s gaslighting that are revealed over time. Yes, women can do anything, even be sociopathic manipulators. In spite of how uncomfortable it was to imagine such behavior, it made for good reading.

The Last One at the Wedding isn’t exactly realistic or down-to-earth, but it will keep you hooked until the end.