The Last Person I Trusted

Nobody accused her of anything. They were concerned about her. Mira Rusk moves her family to Ellery Court - nine houses, one shared group chat, one shared network of doorbell cameras - to be nobody. She has a reason. In the town they left, a child in her care was hurt, and Mira let the record say it was her fault. The welcome committee arrives within the hour. A casserole. A laminated card of house rules. A phone charger that happens to fit her three-year-old phone. Ten weeks later, Cassidy Lark - the woman who organized that basket - vanishes for forty hours and walks back up the middle of the road at dawn, barefoot, unharmed, with no memory of where she has been. She tells nine neighbors and two detectives that the last person she trusted was Mira Rusk. She says it like a compliment. Nobody on Ellery Court ever accuses Mira of anything. They are simply concerned about her - out loud, with dates, in writing - and it costs her her job, her daughter's file and her marriage. And when she finally goes looking for the source of it, she finds four years of footage, one account, one administrator, and a folder with her dead mother's maiden name on it, opened eleven days before she had ever heard of the street. There was never a crime. That is what makes it unsurvivable. The Last Person I Trusted is a psychological thriller about the machinery of neighborly kindness: the casserole as reconnaissance, the group chat as tribunal, and the terrible truth that a record kept out of love is still a record. For readers who loved the dueling narrators of Gone Girl, the cul-de-sac politics of Big Little Lies, and the maternal dread of The Push. It takes a village. Nobody tells you a village is a jurisdiction.