The Last Child
by John Hart
Summary
Johnny Merrimon is thirteen and has stopped being a child in every way but the law's: a year ago his twin sister Alyssa vanished off a Raven County road, and the family did not survive it, his father gone, his mother dissolving into pills and a predatory boyfriend, and Johnny himself remade into something feral and purposeful, a boy who has divided the county into grids and spends his truancies hunting his sister's taker, house by house, registered offender by registered offender, with hand drawn maps and a seriousness no adult will credit.
One adult half does: Detective Clyde Hunt, who worked Alyssa's case into his own wreckage, marriage gone, objectivity gone, and who watches the boy with the guilt of the professional who failed him. The book detonates when a second girl is taken and a dying man's last words to Johnny, struck on the road with the boy as witness, point at where the lost children go. What follows sends Johnny and his loyal, terrified friend Jack into the county's hidden places, swamp, mine and church, and into the path of Levi Freemantle, an enormous escaped convict walking a straight line across the county with a purpose the novel withholds, a giant the plot uses first as terror and then as something closer to instrument, the innocent through whom the buried truth surfaces.
The solution, when Hunt and the boy converge on it, is the genre's hardest kind, close to home and long prepared, and the last pages give the boy back a piece of childhood without pretending the rest survived.
Around three hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want the missing child story at full gothic pressure, driven by one of crime fiction's fiercest young protagonists.
Historical Context & Significance
The Last Child won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2010, completing John Hart's consecutive books double, no other writer has won the top prize with back to back novels, and adding the CWA's Steel Dagger and the Barry, the transatlantic accumulation that marked the book as the period's consensus thriller.
Its engine, the searching child the system cannot see, sits deep in the Southern gothic tradition, Levi Freemantle the giant at the center of its oldest arguments; Hart returned to Johnny Merrimon a decade later in The Hush, the sequel pulling the character into outright supernatural territory, an unusual afterlife for an Edgar winner.
Hart's run of New York Times bestsellers from a first career in law and banking became the model arc agents cite; this book remains the reputation's center, the double Edgar its permanent statistic.