Book Review - Allison Leotta - The Last Good Girl

I originally posted this review over on YouGabSports.com on May 1st, 2016.

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The Last Good Girl

By Allison Leotta

Touchstone / Simon & Schuster Inc

Release Date: May 3rd, 2016

It was his word against hers…until she disappeared.

When Emily Shapiro accuses the scion of a rich and well connected family of raping her inside his college fraternity, she sets in motion the by now all too familiar blame the victim game that seems so prevalent on college campuses.

The fifth book in author Allison Leotta’s Anna Curtis series deals with the hot button topic of sexual assaults on college campuses and the school’s reaction or lack thereof to these assaults.

Anna is still living in Michigan after the events of the previous novel, A Good Killing. She continues to lick her wounds from a broken engagement, but has settled into a companionable relationship with another man while caring for her sister and her newborn niece.

But the somewhat idyllic nature of her status quo is upended when her ex-fiancée calls and effectively drags her into the Shapiro case. Emily has disappeared and she’s being presumed missing if not dead. The prime suspect is Dylan Highsmith, the man she accused of rape.

As a former federal sex crimes prosecutor, Leotta obviously knows the ins and outs of this kind of case. She does a great job in the storytelling while filling you in on the relevant facts and figures that surround the case. That she can do this without repeatedly knocking you over the head with said facts and figures is a testament to her writing ability.

As the story progresses, we learn more about Emily’s case as the author interjects what is set up as transcripts from hearings that were held by the school and from videos the victim posted on a video blog site.

While the details fleshing out the backstory of how “we” ended up at the beginning of the book are necessary to understand just how corrupt, incompetent and backward the college system is at dealing with sexual assault claims, I thought the narrative delivery of these “transcripts” interrupted the linear flow of the story. They tended to pull me out of the story as if they were commercial interruptions in the tale. However, these details were definitely necessary. Particularly noteworthy was how one of the later pieces revealed just how deeply Emily was sold out by the school.

The unrelenting and unsympathetic depiction of the main villain of the piece was definitely the right way to go about things because there sometimes just is not two sides to every story. The enabling of his reprehensible behavior by his family’s legal and political connections had to be stated and shown in the most declarative light.

As Anna Curtis fights to find out the truth, her personal life B-plots end up merging into the case as the two men in her life play huge roles in the outcome of the case.

I was decidedly pleased that Leotta chose to focus her story on the fraternity life at college and didn’t throw in college sports into the mix. The extra layer of power plays and politics that would’ve caused for the story would’ve overwhelmed the story and made the book more of a treatise and less of a compelling work of literary fiction.

I had a couple of nitpicks with the story. The first was with one of the supporting characters, Wyatt. Much like the redemption of Darth Vader in The Return of the Jedi, he spends much of the book being a royal pain in the butt, yet somehow finds at least a measure of redemption for a single act that he should’ve already been doing in the first place.

The other quibble was a more serious one for me. It had to do with the reveal about Emily Shapiro herself. While it doesn’t lessen the severity of what happened to her and her expectation of justice for it, I thought it did undercut her position on the moral high ground a little bit.

Overall, The Last Good Girl works on the two levels it sets out to conquer. It tells a compelling legal thriller story and highlights an area of life that needs more of society’s attention and protections.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received an advance copy of the book from the publisher. You can learn more about Allison Leotta by visiting her website.