I felt like this was a 50/50 read for me. The book goes at a decently steady pace, I would say this is more mystery than suspense and thrill but did have some good turning moments! I like the switch back and forth in books if executed in a way that doesn't confuse or lose me but at times I felt like that did happen which brought my rating a little down. My interest was piqued more with the premise and what I thought would developed versus the actual read from start to finish. FBI Special Agent Lucy Thorne seems like she could be so much more although she does have a lot of character potential. I like storylines that come from rural small towns because there really is so many hidden secrets in a small town that eventually come to the surface so the small town vibe I really like when I pick a book! I tried to love this book but it was more a like. Thank you NetGalley for the copy to review with my own opinions.

Great book. Highly recommend and will most defiantly read more by this author and suggest to others!

I didn't know that Her Final Words was part of a series and if you read from the beginning, this book may hold your interest more. For me, I didn't feel like it was a stand-alone and not reading the rest of the series took away from my enjoyment.

I really enjoyed the writing style in this book. The twists and turns kept my attention throughout. I will definitely be checking out other books by this author and I would recommend this book to friends and family.

A girl asks to speak to a certain FBI agent to confess to a murder. She knows things only the killer would know.
Did she actually commit the murder or does she know who did and is trying to protect them?
A must read to find out.

I tried to read this book 3 separate times and I finally gave up. I don't think there's an exact reason why I couldn't finish this. There were a lot of characters and a lot going on and ultimately I felt like somewhere I'd read this before. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher and I'm voluntarily providing an honest review.

Super fast and easy read. This book is perfect for a night when you want to curl up with a cup of tea and get immersed into a small town detective thriller.

The author was great with building up the background of the town and characters without making the first 100 pages uneventful.

I didn’t mind the time line skips in each chapter because they flowed together really well and it didn’t feel disjointed or confusing.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* peaked my interest for sure, there were small things in didnt cate for but overall really liked it and didnt want to put it down!

I’m loving each and every one of Brianna Labuskes and they get better and better. This one follows Lucy, an FBI agent, investigating a crime where the perpetrator has confessed. Doubtful, she heads to the small rural community where it happened to discover the truth. This community has so many secrets and dubious stories I was hooked and blew off the afternoon of quarantine work. Excellent!

This was a compelling mystery with complex but believable characters. The story had a nice flow to it and kept the tension ratcheted up. Looking forward to reading more.

This is a great book, despite the fact that this is part of a series that I haven't read, I liked some aspects of this, The cover is great and beatiful with that view, the name is cool because this is the last book in the series.

Eliza, a 17 year old girl, walks into the FBI building and confesses to a murder. After giving up the location of the body and the murder weapon, Eliza stops talking. Lucy Thorne is taking the statement, men something makes her uneasy and doesn't add up. There seems to be no motive and can this young girl really be a child killer?
I found this book very entertaining and enjoyable. There are a lot of potential murder suspects and I found it impossible to figure out what had happened and who the killer was, until the very end. Then it all made sense and it was so sad. Sad and upsetting, to think that in 2020 something like this can happen.

What a compelling, well written story! As soon as I started, I couldn't stop reading! The author does such a great job of really building the tension in a room - all just through words. Conversations felt real, the suspense was well done and I was left guessing until the very end. I absolutely loved this one!

Lucy, a FBI agent, finds something off when teenager Eliza confesses to murder. Obviously the murder isn't as cut and dry as Eliza makes it seems because a book was written about it. After Eliza confesses, her mouth is closed like a vault. Lucy is granted 3 days to go to the town the murder took place and investigate.

Knox Hollow may on the surface seem like your typical small town, but it is much more sinister. You realize that something is amiss when it is not out of the norm for children to go missing. In fact, one goes missing in the time Eliza is there. You realize the religion there is more "cult like" and less trying to live by good morals.

Brianna Labukskes, the author, has a writing style that doesn't resonate with me completely, but I feel like with a couple tweaks, it would be one I could get behind. The story wasn't all that original-- I feel like I've watched plenty of movies with a similar storyline. I felt that the killer was pretty easy to predict. In my opinion, too many obvious signs pointing to it.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

HER FINAL WORDS by Brianna Labuskes was another Netgalley book and it was similar, in many ways, to WHITE OUT - the other thriller I picked up that week. It also takes place in a small, rural town (this time in Idaho) with another complicated and fierce female detective. I loved getting to do a deep-dive into this small town's religious community and the secret that lies within it. Why would a teenager kill a young boy? Why are so many others running away - or have they gone missing? Lucy Thorne doesn't take what seems like an open-and-shut case at face value...she's determined to dig deeper, and while this one was a little more predictable for me (I figured out the ending) there were still tons of surprises and twists in store for me, and I definitely recommend this one.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Thank you to @netgalley and tagged publishers for the #gifted ebooks in exchange for an honest review.

I gave Her Final Words by Brianna Labuskes 4 out of 5 stars.

The reader is introduced to FBI agent Lucy Thorne, after a young girl- Eliza, comes into the office and asks for Lucy by name. Lucy is not prepared for Eliza to admit she killed a boy and nothing more. No motive provided, no remorse shown. But as Lucy, soon uncovers, there is more to this story and she is determined to find out what could cause a young girl like Eliza to kill a boy and how does this all tie into a quaint community, full of religion, a small town Sheriff, missing children and Lucy herself. People are keeping secrets and it is up to Lucy to figure out fact from fiction and why children are going missing.

I really enjoyed reading this. I felt, in the beginning, a little confused because the story alternated from Eliza confessing to Lucy and then to Eliza and her friends. There were holes in the beginning that I wanted desperately to have filled but as the story progresses, the reader comes to find those discrepancies will all be addressed.

I thought the book was well written and was full of deception and misdirection. I appreciated the misdirection as I am typically the type of person that wants to figure things out in a book. I thought I had the sure answers and realized I was way off. This book had me on the edge of my seat, wanting to read further- to the point I stayed up until 3am just to finish it.

The characters were developed but not as fully as I would've hoped. However, I liked the characters and how the author really gave them distinct personalities- even the antagonist in the novel was someone you wanted to understand yet hate all at the same time. I loved the religion aspect interwoven within Eliza's story and her reasoning for her actions. It was very different from where I thought it was all going and different in general from most books I have read. It was rather sad to when you realize what was happening to the missing children and why they had gone missing. It wasn't a completely absurd idea which made it all the more heart wrenching and horrific.

I would highly recommend this book for the plot, characters and mystery it holds.

This is a fast-paced thriller from the moment Eliza Cook walks into the office of FBI special agent Lucy Thorn, confessing to the murder of a young boy. Eliza is a teenage girl herself and beyond the details of the murder, says nothing else. The strangeness of the confession and Eliza's determination to only speak to Lucy intrigues Lucy enough to investigate further.

This brings Lucy to Eliza's small town in Knox Hollow, Idaho, home of a close=knit community where there are two sides -- those who are part of the community, and those who chose not to be. Lucy has to navigate the fine line between the two sides, while working with local law enforcement, and racing the clock -- her boss only gave her the weekend to look into what appears to be an open-and-shut case. We follow along as Lucy finds more questions than answers as she digs into the case and the secrets of the community.

This book kept me engaged from start to finish -- right away, the story starts unfolding and takes you on a wild ride, as Lucy's investigation begins. I found the characters to be really fully developed, with their own storylines and standing within (or out of) the community well-described. During Lucy's investigation, there aren't any points where the story line plateaus or slows down -- Lucy is racing the clock and I was racing to find answers!

By the end, I was pleasantly surprised with how the story unfolded; there weren't any loose ends that kept me wondering. This kept me guessing until the very end!

Lots of telling, far too little showing, and an ending that is anticlimactic.

Teenager Eliza Cook walks in to an FBI field office to confess to killing another (almost) teenaged boy. But she will only confess to Special Agent Lucy Thorne. When she lays out her confession, where to find the body, and hands over the knife used in the murder, she also makes a point to tell Lucy that a particular quote from the christian bible is carved on the boy. Then she clamps her mouth shut and refuses to say anything else.

For some reason, Lucy thinks there's more to this story than just Eliza's confession, and of course there is, because otherwise there would be no book. How does she arrive at this? Who knows. The Special Agent in Charge - Lucy's boss - gives her three days to head to Knox Hollow and tease out any story that might be there. That was too bad, as it meant I'd have to keep reading this.

Don't get me wrong: I didn't hate it. I just didn't really like it all that much. Lucy gets to Knox Hollow, meets Sheriff Wyatt Hicks, who has secrets, Eliza's family, who have secrets, other members of their church (which is clearly one of those weird, cultish churches) who all have secrets, a deputy who works under Hicks, who also has secrets....you get the idea. It's like the small town with secrets trope on steroids.

There are also a TON of characters introduced here. Cops, social workers, all the members of the church - if you're not a fan of large casts, you might want to sit this one out.

Pretty soon, Lucy manages to find out that people - and especially kids - just vanish into thin air in this town, and another girl goes missing while she's there.

For someone who only had three days to determine if there was something more going on in this secret-filled little town, Lucy didn't seem to act with a whole lot of urgency. As she went around questioning people, she was often told she should speak to another party, and off she went, pinballing her way from person to person just because someone told her she should. I didn't find her to be a deductive superstar.

The killer is given away before the ending - and it's almost, but not quite, the author holding up a giant neon sign with an arrow pointing to the killer.

The ending was underwhelming, given that someone paying just a little attention could have seen it. The rationale behind the disappearances is semi-plausible, since people do oddball things all the time, in the name of something - in this case, in the name of some fundamentalist church. The whole thing wraps itself up with a bow, and all the loose ends are tied up.

Speaking of churches, there are some glaring errors about this cultish fundamentalist church: it's highly unlikely they would have "Mass" and I'm almost 100% positive they would not carry rosary beads. Those things are part of the catholic rituals, and a cult, even one based on what seems to be the pentecostal flavor of christianity, is not going to have these things in their rituals.

We also don't really get Lucy's story: who she is, deep down, what drives her, what her backstory is. It doesn't mean we need infodumps, but something would have helped me identify with her. As it is, she's more like a "Hey, it's that woman!" in a movie - a character actor whose face is familiar, but whose name you can't recall.

The book shifts through time a *lot*, too. "Three weeks ago", "Today", "Two hours ago" and so on. After awhile, this annoyed me. I do not, in general, dislike timestamps on chapters, but if you're constantly jumping around like this, you're going to confuse the reader's sense of time. If you do it almost constantly, then perhaps you should make it a series - even a duology, with all the events leading up to Eliza getting on a bus to go see Lucy to confess in one book, and then Lucy's investigation in the second. It's hard to get a real sense of what time it is, at least until Lucy reminds herself for the umpteenth time that she has to put this to bed by Monday, and it's now (day) at (time) and well, she'd better hurry. But she doesn't seem to be hurrying, and that's a problem.

Overall, it's readable. It simply didn't grab me, which is a shame because I liked the premise.

Two stars out of five. Perhaps next time, Ms. Labuskes.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and Netgalley for the review copy.

Her Final Words
⭐️⭐️/5 stars

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

I loved Brianna Labuskes’ bestselling novel Girls of Glass, so when I had the opportunity to read this ARC of Her Final Words, I jumped at the chance. I was hoping for something similar to her previous novel I’d read, something that would seize me from the beginning and keep me interested—and more importantly, something that would have an ending that I wouldn’t have seen coming.

About the book:

After a young girl confesses to the murder of a 12-year-old boy, Agent Lucy Thorne becomes entangled in a case set in a small town with big secrets.

Lucy feels that there is much more going on than just a simple cut and dry murder, especially when it quickly becomes clear that the small town of Knox Hollow carries an undercurrent of dark, cult-like activity.

My thoughts:

When it comes to Her Final Words, I was constantly left wanting more.

The story itself is well thought out, but I found myself wishing there was more action to mix in with all of the dialogue and information that we are constantly being fed. And there is a lot of information. Names, connections, personal feelings...it was a lot to keep up with when there really wasn’t much else going on to balance it all out.

The characters did not seem nearly as fleshed out as her bestselling novel, Girls of Glass, and the lead up to the climax and subsequent ending certainly did not surprise me.

When it comes to Labuskes, she is a wonderful writer. Her plot development is on point, and she’s shown with her other books that she is capable of throwing her readers for a loop and giving shocking endings. I know she tried to do the same with this novel, but there was something about the story overall that just fell flat.

The majority of the issue may have been the setting: a small town with an ominous Church, where the believers hold many secrets—some of them dark and unsettling, but all deeds are done in the name of God and the greater good.

This type of stereotype is difficult to keep fresh and exciting, as it’s been done over and over. The whole “Christians are twisted and do bad things in the name of God” spiel is unimaginative. I know things like this happen in real life, sure. But what about other religions? It’s not only Christians that can be kooky and unbalanced—and they’re not that way just because they’re Christians.

But even with all of that, the motive for the killer never packed the punch that I wish it had. We had so much build up to the reveal that, when it was all said and done, I felt a little disappointed in the ending.

While I didn’t enjoy Her Final Words as much as Labuskes’ other works, that certainly does not mean I don’t recommend her books. She has a very unique way of telling her stories; the multiple timelines and perspectives makes you feel like a detective yourself as you try to piece it all together. Overall, her writing is unique and fresh in that way.

So while this one didn’t capture me as well as I’d hoped it would, I’m just one person. And I know there are many people out there that I would highly recommend read Labuskes’ books.

Thank you to Netgalley for sending me this ARC!

Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC of her final words.
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Wow. That was awesome!! The characters, the plot, the setting; they were all amazing.
I couldn't put the book down