Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
He is her husband. She is his captive.
Her husband calls her Jane. That is not her name.
She lives in a small farm cottage, surrounded by vast, open fields. Everywhere she looks, there is space. But she is trapped. No one knows how she got to the UK: no one knows she is there. Visitors rarely come to the farm; if they do, she is never seen.
Her husband records her every movement during the day. If he doesn't like what he sees, she is punished.
For a long time, escape seemed impossible. But now, something has changed. She has a reason to live and a reason to fight. Now, she is watching him, and waiting ...
Through three impressive crime novels starring deaf Swedish journo Tuva Moodyson, ‘forest author’ Will Dean has conjured a great sense of sparse rural landscapes seasoned with creepiness and even claustrophobia (Tuva's tiny town is enclosed by a Grimm brothers like wild forest).
In his first standalone, Dean dials up those ingredients to 12.
THE LAST THING TO BURN is an intimate, intense psychological thriller set among bleak British farmland. Lenn and ‘Jane’ are a farming couple living in isolation on the Fens, a wide-open landscape of browns and greys near the English coastline. But only Lenn is there by choice: Jane is really Thanh Dao, a Vietnamese immigrant living a harrowing life in an open prison. Escape seems impossible: attempts have harsh consequences.. It’s been a damp, dreary, despairing life for several years. When ‘Jane’ falls pregnant, she must risk everything.
Dean has crafted a superb thriller about identity, control, and courage where the pages whir by even though the subject matter can be quite traumatic.
It’s a strong character study of a victim of human trafficking, humming with tension. THE LAST THING TO BURN has echoes of Stephen King’s MISERY, with its claustrophobic, isolated setting and twister power dynamics, while being its very own thing.
An intense read; tough in places, but very much recommended.
Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer from New Zealand, now living in London. In recent years he’s interviewed hundreds of crime writers and talked about the genre on national radio, top podcasts, and onstage at books festivals on three continents. He has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and the McIlvanney Prize, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. His first non-fiction book, SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, was published in 2020. You can heckle him on Twitter.
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