The Last Child

By: John Hart

Narrated by: Scott Sowers

Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Fresh off the success of his Edgar® Award-winning, New York Times bestseller Down River, John Hart returns with his most powerful and intricately-plotted novel yet.

Thirteen year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: happy parents and a twin sister that meant the world to him. But Alyssa went missing a year ago, stolen off the side of a lonely street with only one witness to the crime. His family shattered, his sister presumed dead, Johnny risks everything to explore the dark side of his hometown in a last, desperate search. What he finds is a city with an underbelly far blacker than anyone could've imagined—and somewhere in the depths of it all, with the help of his only friend and a giant of a man with his own strange past, Johnny, at last, finds the terrible truth.

Detective Clyde Hunt has devoted an entire year to Alyssa's case, and it shows: haunted and sleepless, he's lost his wife and put his shield at risk. But he can't put the case behind him—he won't—and when another girl goes missing, the failures of the past year harden into iron determination. Refusing to lose another child, Hunt knows he has to break the rules to make the case; and maybe, just maybe, the missing girl will lead him to Alyssa...

The Last Child is a tale of boundaries: county borders and circles on a map, the hard edge between good and evil, life and death, hopelessness and faith. Perfectly blending character and plot, emotion and action, John Hart again transcends the barrier between thrillers and literature to craft a story as heartrending as it is redemptive.

©2009 John Hart (P)2009 Macmillan Audio

Good book! Not so good narrator!

This is a very good book, but the narrator reads like a child who is just learning to read. It's hard to tell the difference between the different characters when the narrator reads a conversation between characters. I would recommend this book on Audible, but just be aware that the narrator isn't great.

Good story

Story was actually quite good. It took me a few chapters to start enjoying the book because I wasn’t use the narrator’s (Scott Sowers) voice. I guess I got use to deeper baritone narrators like Scott Brick. Regardless, it was worth sticking it out and actually the boys voices by Scott Sowers were pretty good.

Nice summer read!

Narrator top notcg. Slow beginning but slowly drew me in. Definitely worth a listen. Not predictable at all.

Wow. Fantastic book!

Great story. Fast paced. So many twists and turns. This story is interesting, suspensful, and a fantastic read.

Get the print version instead.

I read all the reviews criticizing the narrator before I ordered this, but after listening to the whole sample I thought he was ok. Not great, but ok. Boy was I wrong. the first 1/4 to 1/3 were fine, but then it was as if he'd suddenly become a different reader, one who had only begun to learn to read and pronounced every "a" as "ay" rather than "uh" and each "the" as "thee" rather than "thuh" which was TOTALLY at odds with the Missouri/Arkansas mildly southern accent he used for the rest. It was horribly, maddeningly annoying. And on top of that, he'd lost whatever tiny bit of emotion he'd put into the words earlier in the book. Possibly the worst narrator I've heard. On the bright side, the story was good...if your ears don't bleed from listening to the reader. Buy the print version instead and save yourself an earache.

So good!

Riveting story of betrayal, hope, redemption, and forgiveness. It sheds light into the potential of greater purposes when all seems lost.

A curious performance by Scott Sowers

There was a point when I started to toss this book in my digital DNF file. It was a little over six hours into Part 1, about the time when Johnny was having a dream about his sister and snakes. No, not because snakes are creepy, but this was when I first started to hear Scott Sowers going way overboard with his enunciation. All of a sudden I noticed that every syllable of every word was spoken distinctly, dipthongs became two syllables, and normally elided letter sequences were broken into their component parts. The was never a thu and never an uh.

It started distracting me more and more. I went back and listened again to early parts of the book and heard a trace of the odd speech, but nowhere near as overwhelming.

I soldiered on, trying to keep up with the story. But I was paying more attention to Sowers' narration than to the book. In fact, there was one body unearthed during that odd period of narration, and I have no idea how the guy was killed, so distracting was Sowers' performance. I looked for some sort of explanation for this curious change in narration. Something in the story line, requiring special pronunciation? Something about the characters, maybe an astral influence? No. Nothing.

From somewhere early in Part 2 onwards, Sowers' accent started sounding more and more normal, or normal for one doing North Carolina. By the end Sowers was back to form. In fact, he did a superb job capturing the despair of one of the young boys in the story, as he pleads with his friend for understanding.

I thought Sowers did an excellent job of capturing North Carolina in "Down River", and said so. Since that book was released two years before this one, I assume it was produced first, so I have no idea why Sowers would still be messing around with an accent he had apparently mastered.

Anyhow, was the book good? You bet. I started off prepared to not like it when I discovered the protagonist was a 13 year old boy, thinking this would wind up a modern-day Hardy Boys treatment. Time went by, however, and I started getting into it. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief to buy into some of the things Johnnie does, but in the end it all works very well.

I do wonder if John Hart has read much of Kathy Reich's Temperance Brennan ("Bones") series? If I remember correctly, it sometimes takes Tempe hours to determine just the sex of a body that's been buried for a few years. John Hart's medical examiner does sex, age, and maybe cause of death, all at a glance.

I started reading John Hart with "Down River" because it won an Edgar. That was one of the best books I have ever read. This one had the potential, but Scott Sowers' strange changes in accent and enunciation dragged it down for me.

Book is Wonderful, Narration is Horrible!

The story is complelling and the characters wonderful and real. The narration takes so much away from the story that I often had to re-listen to sections because I started tuning the reader out. The over pronunciation will drive you nuts! Great story too bad it is killed by the narrater.

Maybe the title should have been "SMALL"

The story deserves a higher rating, but the use of the word "small" sent me cringing! I didn't count how many times it was used, but trust me, it had to be over a hundred. Perhaps reading wouldn't have pointed it out so blatantly. Or maybe it was just this reader! Every "The" is pronounced with a strong long "E", every "A" the same, and if you don't mind hearing "again" prounounced "agane" out of context with a southernish accent...ugh. It was a GOOD story to keep me interested despite all these distractions. Sometimes the sample length is not long enough to get a good idea of the reader's performance. This one nearly ruined this book for me.

Fantastic!

Great read. Full of twists and turns. This is definitely one of those drive around for hours wasting gas audiobooks. As someone who has a lot of experience working in the law enforcement field, I found the portrayal of the detectives very realistic. This author has a flair for portraying local color, and I found myself immersed in the geography and culture of Eastern North Carolina. The narrator was a perfect fit for the material. I am not a serial book reviewer and this is the first review that I've written. I did feel, however, the need to praise this particular book.