This is a fascinating account of how police tease out a compulsive liar's story over a period of a couple of years that eventually yields mixed results. Two girls, Sheila, 12 and Kate, 10, disappear from a shopping centre in Washington DC in the 1970s. At the time, Lloyd Welch is 18 years old and gives the police an eye witness account of having seen them get into a stranger's car. The girls were never seen again and Lloyd's tip came to nothing.

In 2013, a detective working on cold cases looks again at the case and discovers that another witness account describes a man hanging around the shopping centre at the time the girls went missing who looked remarkably like Lloyd Welch. Lloyd Welch becomes a person of interest.

Bowden puts this story together in a compelling manner which had me turning the pages until the end. Most of the book comprises of the interviews police had with Lloyd. These were mostly more than 6 hours long and exposes not only the techniques the detectives used to get at the truth but also Lloyd's pattern of behaviour that would lead to a small breakthrough keeping the case alive. It also points to how an abusive childhood leads to generational consequences. For fans of true crime, this is a must read.

This is a true crime cold case. After 40 years the police are looking at this case yet again and trying to find the killer(s). What they uncover is an extremely dysfunctional family orchard, not just a tree but a whole orchard of dysfunction. It's an interesting story and I'm happy that the parents of the 2 little girls finally get some semblance of closure but... This story was very dialogue driven and tedious. Granted that is probably the way these interrogations go but it was very slow reading and lots of reiterating. I did enjoy the book but I felt like I was slogging through it.

I am a big fan of the author's work. Bowden has written great books in the past that I loved, including Black Hawk Down, Doctor Dealer, and Killing Pablo. His propensity for digging into a project until it has been fully examined, plus his great writing ability is phenomenal.
Unfortunately, I do not feel that this is one of his better books.
This is the story of the kidnapping of two young girls from a Maryland mall in 1975. At the time of the event, the case remained unsolved. It was one of Bowden's earliest assignments as a reporter. Many years later, a cold case detective team discovered a lead which had been missed. They followed the clues to a man who claims to have witnessed the abduction. The detectives found the man, Lloyd Welch, incarcerated. What followed was two years of interviews/interrogations of Welch, in which his story changed almost daily. The man was such a habitual liar that no one could ever discern the truth from him.
Should have been an interesting read, but in actuality it was quite tedious. Basically just transcripts of the interviews.
We will probably never know the truth of what happened to the two girls, or where their bodies may be. I feel horrible for the family.

If you are a true-crimer like me, you get excited when you find a book that discusses a cold case, because it is always a bit of a miracle when a cold case is solved. However, this does not have as much of a satisfying ending. I didn't love this book, but I don't think it is the author's fault as much as it is just that the man investigated, Lloyd Welch, really irritated me, and frankly so did his entire family.

I liked how the author focused solely on the re-investigation more than 30 years after the disappearance of the Lyons sisters. I don't always like when an author focuses on the victims' families. I prefer to learn about the investigation process. The author displays the many interrogations the police had with Lloyd Welch, and after the third one, you can't help but feel that you get the point: he is going to lie and change his story every time. However, the author still discussed more interrogations, because every one of them revealed something new and different in the case. The patience of those detectives in search for justice was remarkable. It must have been so frustrating to have so many people lying to them on a regular basis and not be able to find solid proof (like DNA).

However, I will reiterate that this does not really have a satisfying ending, which is why I could not give this a 5-star rating. It was a frustrating read. Frankly, I feel that many members of the Welch family probably deserve to be in jail for either direct crimes against the Lyons sisters, other crimes that they seem to have committed based on interviews with them, or for obstruction of justice.

Interviews that Solved a Cold Case Murder

Mark Bowden was a reporter on a local Washington DC paper when two sisters, ages 10 and 12, vanished from a suburban mall. The girls were never found, but thirty-five years later a cold case detective discovered a clue, missed at the time, that pointed to Lloyd Welch. Welch was incarcerated for sexual abuse of a girlfriend’s daughter when the case was reopened.

Now that they had a viable suspect, a team was put together to investigate. Bowden joined the team. This is the story of that cold case investigation.

The early chapters tell the story of the disappearance of the sisters and the first investigation. It’s well written, but reads like most true crime books. The majority of the book is taken up with interviews with Lloyd Welch. While the interviewing technique is interesting, it becomes repetitive after awhile. There are additional facts that fill out the crime and investigation, but the focus is on Lloyd and the clever interview techniques used by the investigators.

If you’re a fan of true crime, or even police procedurals, this is an enjoyable book. However, be prepared for a slow slog in the middle.

I received this book from Net Galley for this review.

Books that offer a view into a disturbed mind usually fascinate me. While The Last Stone has its moments of intrigue, overall I was disappointed in the content.

The author focuses almost solely on the interrogation of Lloyd Welch. The problem with this tactic is the constant repetition. Welch is a pathological liar who plays games with the detectives. During each session, Welch offers a slightly altered version of the story he'd previously told, and so we're reading a lot of the same things, over and over. The only reason it remains even semi-interesting is because the dialogue is lifted verbatim from the interrogations, and so we get an inside glimpse of the conversations between Welch and the detectives.

The biggest disappointment for me was that the author made little attempt to give the Lyons girls an identity. They were just two girls, interchangeable with any other two girls. I learned nothing about who they were.

The content also doesn't offer us much of a connection with the cops involved in this case. I would have liked to understand what it was like for them to sit through dozens of hours interrogating Lloyd Welch.

A word of caution: This book has a lot of graphic detail about sexual deviancy with children. Lloyd Welch and his entire extended family are portrayed in a way I can't even fathom. Sexual abuse and incest were, apparently, the norm with almost all of these people. I don't think we needed the extent of details in all the situations described.

Overall, this book is notable for the insight into police interrogations, but it lacks insight into the broader aspects.

Thanks to NetGalley, Atlantic Monthly Press, and Mark Bowden for the opportunity to read this true crime story. 3.5 stars rounded up.

This is the story of the kidnapping deaths of two young sisters from a shopping mall in Maryland in 1975. But it's really the story of Lloyd Welch - the backwoods product of an incestuous, abusive family, who was eventually charged with these crimes and the detectives who spent years interviewing him. It was almost 40 years after the crimes before Lloyd was ever really questioned about his involvement when they were reviewing the file as a cold case. The interviews spanning years were a bit slow moving and repetitive, mainly because Lloyd is a liar of unbelievable portions - the stories changed daily.

The book was definitely well researched and written; I just found it to be a bit slow moving. Your heart goes out to the parents of these girls and those like them that fall prey to such monsters.

Nonfiction is really my jam. I enjoy learning about things I don't know and learning why people do the things they do. True Crime is a relatively new addition to the nonfiction love [I read "Helter Skelter" in school and it scared me so much that it was years before I picked up another true crime book] and for the most part, it has been interesting to delve into a world I [thankfully] know nothing about. So when I saw this book at NetGalley and realized I didn't know the story, I jumped at the chance to read it.

Uh, yeah. This was not the winner I was hoping it to be. And while it grabbed my attention at first, it quickly becomes a lesson in tedium and repetition and frustration. It is basically just the transcripts of TWO years worth of interviews with the inmate [I refuse to say his name and give him more publicity, even in my insignificant review] to figure out just what was truth and what was a lie in regards to the kidnapping and murder of two little girls in 1975 [it took 38 years of it being cold case before they got a break]. What they found was a man who was clearly involved, but is such a pathological liar and a sociopath that it is very, very difficult to differentiate between truth and lies. There is no real story here - I mean, the author tries to tell a story, but for awhile, it just feels like one big run-on sentence. And the frustration of over how this is handled AFTER they start getting confessions from the inmate is beyond frustrating.

While the case itself is fascinating, and the inner workings of a very twisted and backwards family [incest and abuse and molestation were all part of the norm in this family], the way the book is laid out and the story presented, it becomes absolute tedium to read and finish [though I did finish the book, it was tough]. I only finished because I had to know what happened and then was extremely disappointed in the ending. There was no "happy ending" here for the family and for that I am very, very, sad. I truly feel for the girl's parent; they are the ones that will never, ever recover from this, even over 40 years later.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic/Atlantic Monthly Press for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was unable to completely read this book. the active voice narration with the vivid description was a little too much for me.
I thought I would be able to read this because I do read a large number of thrillers but watching a man constantly list out stuff done to kids was hard for me and I could not finish it. I am not saying it was not a good book but it was not for me.
It was interesting to watch the level of patience the investigators had to have to keep questioning (as far as I did read)

One of the most intriguing true crime books I've read. A really compelling way of telling the story. The fact that the majority of the book is told with transcripts of interrogations gives readers a true view of what it's like to be a detective on a cold case, and the thoroughness of what they do as they investigate. Highly recommended.

I can't even imagine the research that went into writing this book - just combing through the interview transcripts alone must've taken forever. I was surprised how much of this book was direct quotations from the police interviews with Lloyd Welch, but it was fitting. This story is all about a pathological liar, and hearing his lies straight from his mouth drove home just how insane he was. This also made the book feel incredibly exhausting and repetitive, but again, I think this gave readers just a small glimpse of how frustrating and draining it must have been to be on that police team. My only wish is that there had been more background on the investigators, as I really started to care about them (and their physical and mental well being as they worked with Welch for 2 years). This was a study in police interrogation and is definitely worth checking out if you're into true crime.

Those of us who live in the DC area are familiar with the case of the Lyons sisters, who tragically disappeared in 1975. Every year around the time they vanished, at the age of 10 and 12, local media would revisit the case. No one here forgot them-especially not the detectives who worked so hard to resolve this for their parents. Bowden has done an excellent job of detailing what happened when one of them discovered a long forgotten interview of a real creep named Lloyd Welch. There is unusual insight here into how an interrogation proceeds, especially when dealing with someone who is as cruel and inhumane as Welch. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. This is one for fans of both procedurals and true crime. Well done.

Mark Bowden is a gem in the narrative journalism field. I've so often been sucked into reading a longread story, that kind of lose-track-of-time reading experience, and see it's his after finally checking the byline. He's such a wonderfully compelling storyteller and a thorough, detail-oriented journalist.

In The Last Stone, he revisits the recently-solved case of the Lyon sisters - Katherine and Sheila, two young girls gone missing from a shopping mall in a DC suburb of Maryland in 1975. It's one of those nightmarish, warn-your-children cases that haunted the Lyon family and the town of Wheaton and became infamous in the area, and happens to be a case that he followed and reported on early in his career. As it haunted the locals, so it haunted Bowden too as it remained unsolved over the intervening decades.

"As a green, twenty-three-year-old reporter, I tried to see the Lyon case as a story, my first chance to write front-page news. The people I wrote about were subjects, and tragedy a thing that happened to others. But the Lyons were people I liked, even admired. I could not witness their pain dispassionately."

The case was such a scary one because it's infinitely rare that missing children were taken by strangers. It usually tends to be someone related to or close to the child somehow. But after clearing that possibility in this case, no other option remained, hence the fear and unsettling feelings left in the wake of their mysterious disappearance.

"Of the thousands of missing children cases reported each year, those involving children taken by a stranger number only one-hundredth of one percent - on average about one hundred cases a year in the United States, a number that has changed little for as long as such statistics have been kept."

38 years later, in 2013, a team of cold case detectives looking at the evidence decided to re-interview a man named Lloyd Welch, then in prison, thinking that he could provide them with information about the man they then suspected may have been involved or responsible. Welch had come forward during the time immediately after the Lyons' disappearance with a story for police about how he'd witnessed another man abducting the children. He was questioned and eventually let go.

But as the detectives listened to his story, it became clear there was more substance to it than the detectives originally involved had ascertained. In fact, it becomes obvious Welch had done what so many offenders do - found a way to insert himself into the investigation. They abandon their original theory and hone in on subtly trying to learn more from him without scaring him into shutting up entirely. They continue questioning him using deceptive tactics to try and come at his story from different angles, always in the hopes of extracting some new bit of information they can corroborate.

"Maddening as Lloyd was - he was like a fairy-tale goblin guarding a treasure, speaking in riddles - they needed to keep him engaged."

What eventually emerges are the outlines of a narrative revealing the fate of the Lyons sisters. Welch's story leads them to the clan of his extended family in rural Virginia, a surreally strange bunch that unfortunately fulfill some stereotypes of backwoods Appalachians, namely the incest one. It's an eerie, unsettling glimpse into a part of the country that gets a bad rap that's reinforced here, though it's hard to feel sympathy for this troubled and troubling family who have kept a lot of secrets in their insular community.

They also provide great opportunity for Bowden's writing to shine through in what's primarily a dialogue-based narrative. His description of Edna, Lloyd's stepmother, for example: "a deceptively simple, mean country woman in her eighties, sharp as the cut rim of a tin can and prone to didactic and random biblical quotation."

The detectives are as duplicitous as Lloyd himself is. It's a bit uncomfortable reading sometimes, having read so much about false confessions that were coerced, and it's easy to see where such tactics could go horribly wrong applied to a different kind of mind.

Still, this is the flip side of that, where deceptive tactics in interrogation actually produced the desired psychological effect on a guilty person and resolved a terrible cold case, giving the remaining relatives at least some peace of mind that a guilty person is paying for their crimes at last.

"Soon after I started working on this book, when Dave told me how liars lie about the big things but flesh out their fiction with the truth, I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. This story illustrates his point. To discern the truth, an investigator (or writer) must interpret testimony."

What's most interesting is seeing an investigation so up close, with large amounts of dialogue extracted directly from interrogations, and Bowden providing explanatory commentary alongside it. He was allowed access to their interview recordings, and they explain their methodology as the investigation processes, making this a uniquely in-depth look at interrogative procedures and cold case work at every twist and turn.

But it feels unsatisfying and somewhat frustrating It's still not entirely clear what exactly happened, and how (I don't mean the gory details, of which there are more than enough suggested already, but something that could be more helpful, like how Welch managed to convince two children to leave the mall with him and control them both, an oddity he never sufficiently explains), and who exactly was involved. Some of his relatives knew something, and some helped him dispose of items that may have included at least one of the girls' bodies, but things remain hazy.

The truth is in there somewhere, but the resolution is sad and awful. It's page-turning because of Bowden's masterful storytelling: even when he steps back and lets dialogue carry the book, his skilled hand in the construction is evident and it's impossible not to be fascinated and invested in how it plays out. An appealing and compelling look at a mystery as it unravels.

"Human motivation is too hard to pin down, pieces refuse to fit, and memories notoriously differ. Add the passage of decades and the problem gets harder."

I'm sorry to have to say this but this book drags. Every word of every interview seems to be included here and it is absolute agony to go over all the times the perp makes admissions, retractions, hints, denials over and over again. At one point I just couldn't take it any more. After many dozens of pages the conclusion is predictable in the extreme and not satisfying. I know you don't want to get reviews like this but I just won't pretend on something that is aching for an editor.

"The Last Stone" focuses on the cold-case investigation into the kidnapping (and presumed murder) of two pre-teen sisters (Sheila and Kate Lyons) in 1975. Almost forty years later, in 2013, detectives with the Montgomery County (MD) Police Department were focusing on a pedophile and murderer named Ray Mileski who had utilized older teenage boys to lure younger girls and boys, who were then sexually abused. However, he had died and so the police needed someone who could provide a strong enough link to him to justify a warrant to excavate the basement of his old home. The person they hoped could provide that link was Lloyd Lee Welch, who was in prison for sexual assault. Back in 1975 he was an eighteen-year-old drifter and drug addict who had been seen at the mall from where the girls were taken on the day they disappeared and who had gone back to the mall a week later to talk with a security guard and report he witnessed the kidnapping. However, when he told the story to the police, he flunked a lie detector test and the police dismissed him.

The book is unique in that the story is largely told through a series of interviews between October 2013 and July 2015 with Lloyd by three detectives . Lloyd is an inveterate liar and the more he talks and the more his stories change, the more suspicious the detectives become that Lloyd might have been involved.

This book presents an enjoyable and interesting conundrum. You can't like Lloyd Welch. He is a despicable person who has done abhorrent things. You would never want him in the same room as your female relatives or friends (or yourself if a woman). Yet, if this book had been a work of fiction and if the author had invented the Lloyd Welch character, he would be the favorite character because of his personality, interactions with the detectives, and his crazy stories that keep changing to fit the situation.

This is an interesting book and well worth reading.

I received a copy of the e-book through NetGalley in exchange for a review.

I'm a true crime fanatic and was excited to receive an ARC of The Last Stone.

I enjoyed following the story, but felt it would have been much better had some of the back and forth between Lloyd and the officers been shortened. After a bit the changing stories he told and the constant lies just all blurred together because each chapter (almost) was filled with more police questioning of him.

Please don't get me wrong. The story did unfold and it was a fascinating story. I would recommend it to other true crime fans. I just felt some of the back and forth could have been cut and replaced with something somewhat more interesting.

Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to read an ARC at my request. My thoughts in this review are my own.

In March 75 two sisters, aged just 10, and 12 searingly vanished, sending shock waves through a community.
An extensive police operation was unable to find any leads, and the case ran cold, until 2013. A cold case team snagged a lead that Lloyd Welch who was serving time for child abuse.
A team of four detectives strived to seek justice, but Welch does everything he can to derail them. A compulsive psychopathic liar, who constantly changes his version of events. The team utilised all of their expert techniques in a quest for the truth.
This is a chilling tale, somewhat lengthy in parts, maybe some of the dialogue could have been trimmed down.
Overall an interesting read. Thank you to Netgalley, Grove Atlantic, and Mark for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In 1974, I was 18 years old, living at home with my parents, in Fort Worth, Texas, when three teenage girls disappeared from a mall in that city. Those girls have never been found. Then on March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, age 10 and 12, disappeared from a mall in Washington, D.C. As a journalism student in both high school and college, despite not having the easy access to news that we have nowadays with the internet, I followed both stories closely, over the years. So when I saw that The Last Stone has been written about what had happened to Kate and Sheila I definitely wanted to read it.

lloyd Welch dominates this book but I don't want to give him credit for anything. Lloyd is truly evil and the only person he cares about his himself. Never have I read about a real person who was more of a compulsive liar than Lloyd. His words are worthless because the man has no comprehension of the meaning of truth.

Then there are the four detectives (and others) who worked to get the truth of what happened to Kate and Sheila out of Lloyd. I'm amazed that their acting skills, their ability to change tactics instantly in the midst of interviews with Lloyd, and how well they worked together and off of each other to resolve this case to the best of their abilities. The author states that most of the dialogue in this book was recorded and that puts us right there in the interview room with Lloyd and the detectives. Reading this book was difficult because of the subject matter but I'm thankful to know the efforts that were expended to find Kate and Sheila. Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for this ARC.

My heart was racing as I was reading this book. I was so impressed with the details that went into the book. The way that the detectives handled Lloyd and how far they went to try to solve this cold case file.
I was left a bit disappointed that there wasn't any pictures or any updates of the families.
I also felt that the book would have been better served if the author had condensed some of the interviews down, instead of just going verbatim.
Overall an excellent true crime book that left me wanting to wring Lloyds NECK! I just wanted justice for those girls.

This work of nonfiction makes some types of police work look particularly arduous and frustrating, because just reading this was slow moving and repetitive.

In 1975, two sisters, Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ages 12 and 10, went to the mall together and were never seen again. Three days later, 18-year-old Lloyd Welch comes to the police with a rambling story of seeing the girls go off with a man with a limp, another tip that leads the cops nowhere closer to finding the girls. In 2013, a police officer revisits Lloyd’s file and wonders if he can finally get answers for the parents and for the county that was so devastating by their disappearance, thus starting a new investigation that would involve millions of dollars and manhours of interviewing the entire very screwed up Welch clan. (A scary, terrifying family that embodies every ugly Deliverance stereotype of backwoods folks.)

Lloyd is a liar who endlessly changes his story. I was frustrated as a reader, so I can’t imagine how exasperating this was for all the cops involved. This book would have been better if it were much shorter. It was so, so slow. The endless interrogations in which Lloyd lies was maddening. I never got to know any of the cops well, so it wasn’t like I was rooting for any of them in particular. I just kept reading to see if there would be any satisfying answers. I would skip this one. I’ve read much better true crime books before.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book, which RELEASES APRIL 2, 2019.