Last Girl Breathing by Court Stevens || Small Town Murder Mystery

Last Girl Breathing

When the answers to a present-day murder lie in the past, one teen girl must examine a tragic event to prevent more lives from being lost. No one expected it to rain that much. But the rain kept coming, the dam broke, and lives were lost. One was Lucy Michaels’s little brother. She was there and while she saved the lives of many young boy scouts, despite being a child herself, she couldn’t save him.

Now eight years later, Lucy is preparing to graduate from high school and compete in the air rifle competition at the Olympics when her stepbrother goes missing right before his most important football game. The search is focused on the same plot of land where her younger brother died, and she can’t help but draw parallels.

When the search for a missing person becomes a murder investigation, Lucy knows the secrets she holds about what her stepbrother was up to that day could help find the murderer. The clues quickly connect Lucy’s ex-boyfriend to the murders, but he couldn’t be guilty... could he?

Everyone involved has their own secrets and revealing hers to the wrong person could put her life—and her whole town—at risk. Last Girl Breathing is a page-turning hunt for the truth as Court Stevens once again creates nonstop suspense with characters who will break your heart.

Content Tags:

Perfect for readers who want:

• Small town murder mystery that haunts residents
• Emotional, heartbreaking exploration of grief and loss
• A slowly unraveling mystery filled with secrets
• A mystery eight years in the making, where the past isn’t as dead and buried as it seems
• Small town claustrophobic, suspicious feel

I received a copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Quotes are taken from an unfinished project and may differ from their final versions.

I’ve read (and enjoyed) Court Stevens’ other works, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her in person. (In case you’re wondering, she’s absolutely delightful and a brilliant, inspiring speaker and if you have the chance to hear her speak, I can’t recommend it enough.) All that to say that from the moment this book was announced, I knew I was going to read it, regardless of what it was about. But once I read the summary? I needed to read this book!

Last Girl Breathing is a small-town mystery thriller where one of Lucy’s brothers is dead (has been for years) and the other is newly missing. And everyone in town is a suspect. But there are no strangers in small towns. Which means someone Lucy knows is to blame.

Stevens really strikes at the heart of the reader, allowing them to experience Lucy’s grief and fear and worry right along with her. While the mystery is compelling, going back over a decade and weaving forward into the future, it’s the raw emotions that really shone the most for me with this book. I figured out who had done it pretty early on (cue me shouting at Lucy to wake up). But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? In a small town, everyone knows each other. And no one wants to believe that someone they know would betray them in the most unthinkable ways.

Lucy is a teenager beyond her years, meaning she’s had to shoulder more than her fair share worth of struggle and emotion.

When her brother died eight years ago, Lucy was unable to save him, despite being there and saving others—a guilt which she carries to this day. So when her step-brother is unreachable and her mother immediately imagines the worst, it’s up to Lucy to keep her composure and calm her mother. After all, what are the odds of losing two children from the same family, albeit eight years apart?

It’s pretty clear, early on, that Lucy does a lot of just surviving. She’s been handed a rough lot in life, but if she doesn’t keep a level head and hold things together, who will? It’s a burden she shouldn’t have to shoulder at this stage in her life, but she does, and oh boy is that relatable. I appreciate how raw and relatable her character is, and the way we, as readers, get to experience the story through her very complicated (but entirely understandable) emotions.

When Lucy’s stepbrother goes missing and the parallels between her younger brother’s death become too apparent to ignore, that’s bad enough. When it turns to murder, though, and signs start pointing to the people Lucy’s close to, it’s hard for her to know who to trust. Especially when her own actions that day are suspicious.

As is often the case with murder mysteries like this, everyone has secrets. And they’re keeping them close to their chest. Even Lucy. Especially Lucy. She knows she didn’t do it (obviously she didn’t do it), but she’s also aware that the truth may make her look guilty. And being blamed for her brother’s murder is the last thing she needs. Especially when she already blames herself for her younger brother’s death.

Everything about the mystery unfolds a little at a time, taking the reader on a ride full of lies, deceit, and half-truths—not always given maliciously. But sometimes people knows what it looks like, even if that’s not the full truth. Little by little, things piece together, including what really happened eight years ago when Lucy lost her little brother.

A small town setting makes this murder mystery all the more poignant. Because when you’ve grown up in a town, surrounded by the same people since you were little, who wants to believe that any of them might be capable of murder?

As someone who grew up in a small town and now, as an adult, lives in yet another small town, this really highlighted the familiar, claustrophobic feeling that can sometimes arise in a place where everyone knows almost everyone else. Lucy grew up there. She experienced all her joy and grief and success and failure there, celebrated with those same people, leaned on them in her time of need, stumbled forward as a town when catastrophe struck. So the idea that any one of them may have been involved in what happened to either of her brothers is unthinkable.

For me, living in a small town, this was perhaps one of the most heartbreaking and relatable parts of the story. Because you can never really know the people around you, no matter how much you think you do. And betrayal in a small town hits all the harder, because people erroneously think things like murder can’t happen in a place like this. No one wants to believe the worst of people they’ve known their entire lives, even as they start pointing fingers and growing suspicious of their neighbors.

Despite featuring a compelling mystery with plenty of twists and turns, what really made an impression on me when reading Last Girl Breathing is the description of Lucy’s raw, poignant emotions as she wrestles with everything that’s happening.

There are books where you, as a reader, may not care so much that someone has died, and you’re just here for the mystery, even if that means an ever-rising body count. That’s okay when characters are disposable, and goodness knows I’ve read and enjoyed my fair share of these books. But that’s not what this is.

Even though, as a reader, we already know that people have died, Stevens reminds us, over and over again, what they meant to the people in the town. She reminds us of the life that they lived and the hole that exists now that they’re gone. Stevens doesn’t shy away from the big, tough emotions and describes them with a vulnerability and honesty that kept hitting me right in the feels. I’ve lost people I love (thankfully not due to murder, but still). Grief is a nearly universal emotion, as is guilt, so it was incredibly easy to empathize with Lucy and all she’s going through.

About Court Stevens

Courtney “Court” Stevens grew up in the knockabout town of Bandana, Kentucky. She is a former adjunct professor, youth minister, Olympic torchbearer, and bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, TN. These days she writes coming-of-truth fiction and is the Executive Director of Warren County Public Library in Bowling Green, KY. She has a pet whale named Herman, a bandsaw named Rex, and a tiny fleet of novels with her name on the spine.

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