Review with Spoilers for Famous Last Words

• So. In the book’s first section, we learn that Luke took three hostages in a warehouse: the wife of a police officer (who owned the warehouse) and two other men.
• We also learn that Isabella, the female hostage, revealed the location of a secret back elevator in exchange for her freedom.
• Luke then shot the other two hostages and escaped out the back elevator.
• No one comes forward to identify the two hostages.

Camilla is understandably shocked and distraught. She helps Niall and the police try to figure out why her husband would have done this, but she has no answers. She thought they were happy, and never saw that side of Luke.

Then the narrative jumps forward SEVEN YEARS

At first I was like whaaaaat? But I decided that this was interesting. And here’s the update on Cam’s life:

• Luke is still missing
• Cam has a new boyfriend named Charlie
• Adam comes up again. Adam is one of Cam’s author clients, who got a two-book deal but never turned in the first book. Let’s discuss him below.
• Cam gets a mysterious text with coordinates and a time.
• She goes, hoping to see Luke, but no one arrives.
• She doesn’t know that the police are still monitoring her phone. They intercepted the text and changed the time to try to catch Luke.
• Niall is in therapy. He’s the one sent to the meeting place. He even texts the number back, but the person figures out that it’s not Camilla texting.
• Cam is trying to have Luke declared legally dead so that she can sell their house.

Then something pretty exciting (to me) happens:

• Cam gets Adam’s second book. It doesn’t say it’s from Adam, but he insisted on snail mailing his manuscripts so it must be from him.

Really?

Here was my theory at this point:

I thought Adam was really Luke. I didn’t think Cam had met him, he insisted on mailing his manuscript. Plus, Luke was a writer himself. So I was convinced he was sending Cam a message in this manuscript.

Other interesting things also happen:

• Someone (who seems like Luke’s sister) has been spying on Camilla.
• And Niall traces the burner phone that sent the coordinates to two locations: Central London and Dungeness, in Southeast England. Niall goes there but finds nothing.
• Adam turns up at a publishing party. And Cam recognized him. So is this the end of my theory?
• A guest at the party tells Cam that Luke had to cancel a meeting with her to go to a funeral. A funeral Cam knew nothing about.

This funeral is Cam’s first real clue.

And she has enough information to find out whose funeral it was: a teenager boy named Alexander Hale. His body, along with that of another teenager, James Lancaster, were found the year Luke went missing.

Meanwhile, Niall is still obsessed with Luke’s case and frustrated that his colleagues have given up on it. He contacts Luke on his burner number and says he will help him see Cam again.

• Cam is distressed that the Daily Mail has dredged up Luke’s case.
• But she’s enjoying James’s manuscript.
• After the Daily Mail article comes out, a woman who says she’s the wife of one of Luke’s hostages approaches Cam. They set a meeting.
• The woman spying on Cam reports this.
• Cam finds a phone number for an H. Grace in Luke’s things. She calls it, but the man on the other end refuses to speak to her.

Niall is also on the same trail as Camilla

• Niall is notified of Camilla’s call, and his office tells him Harry Grace is a criminal.
• Grace tells Niall that Luke came to him for protection.
• After Grace flees, Niall finds a log-in information to a forum. There, he finds a conversation in which Luke asks Harry to get him a gun.
• Luke tells Harry someone wants to murder him and has asked him to met him at a warehouse.
• There’s another conversation when Luke is at the warehouse with two masked men. Contract killers.
• But Niall is frustrated when his colleagues just don’t see the point of investigating.

• Camilla learns that the woman she was supposed to meet was murdered.
• Niall calls and asks to meet and Camilla is terrified that he will tell her Luke murdered Madison.
• Niall tells Camilla his theory about Luke: that contract killers were lying in wait for him at the warehouse. That Luke knew they were after him, and had tried to buy a gun.
• Niall also tells Cam that the Met is spying on her phone.
• Niall realizes that Luke was near the place Alexander Hale and James Lancaster were killed on the night they were killed.
• Cam is still reading the book she thinks James wrote, narrated by a young (dead) man in a crime family. Their drug supplier killed him, and the supplier was killed accidentally by a bystander.
• But Adam shows up at a party and confesses that he did NOT send Cam a manuscript.
• Niall realizes that he didn’t miss the connection between Luke, Hale and Lancaster. Someone removed it from the police system, and that person could only have been George Louis, the warehouse owner.
• Camilla realizes that the crime family book Luke sent to her was the story of his disappearance: a teen from a crime family was killed by a teen from another crime family.
• Niall learns that George Louis is the brother of Janet Hale, the mother of Alex, one of the teen victims.

Spoilers for Famous Last Words and The Ending Explained

• We learn that the person spying on Camilla is her boyfriend Charlie, George and Janet’s brother.
• Camilla is desperate to get home to the manuscript she now knows that Luke wrote.
• Niall hears George telling Isabella that Luke wrote a book that tells how Alex killed James. When Luke saw this and tried to help, he inadvertently killed Alex.
• When the Hale family sent two assassins after Luke, he killed them both. So the Hales needed to make Luke disappear.
• Camilla sees a text on Charlie’s phone asking him to keep an eye on Camilla. Charlie is in on it all!
• Camilla manages to get to the garden to find the gun that Luke mentioned in his manuscript.
• Meanwhile, Niall is following George and Isabella, unaware that Cam is in danger.
• We learn that Cam shot Charlie in the leg.
• She runs to where thinks Luke must be.

I’m not usually a quote person, but I loved this one:

At the heart of this mystery was a book that solved everything for her, the way they always do. A story that made sense of the chaos of life. All sides of it, written down in her husband’s careful hand. For her, so that she understood it.

Back to the Ending of Famous Last Words Explained…

• Cam finds Luke, in a “lockup under my name,” meaning in St. Luke’s. And he explains:
• One night he took Poly for a drive. He saw one teenager shoot another one. I jumped out of the car, shoving the shooter to the ground, where the shooter hit his head.
• Luke left the scene, but then went back. The father of one of the victims saw him. Then Luke went to the boy’s funeral, and was seen again. And followed, and identified.
• In the warehouse, one of the assassins put his gun down and Luke grabbed it. He tied the two men up.
• Isabella offered Luke a way out (through the back elevator) if he’d let her go.
• Before she left, she untied the two assassin/hostages (huh?)
• The hostages came for Luke, and he had to shoot them.

Why Didn’t Luke Tell Cam Any of This?

That was my main question. The two of them had such an amazing relationship. Luke said he felt he had enemies everywhere: on the police force and in organized crime.

What Made Luke Try to Contact Cam Again?

When he realized she was trying to declare him dead. He knew that because he was still able to access his email through VPNs at internet cafes.

What Happens to the Characters at the end of Famous Last Words?

• Niall follows George and Isabella to a lighthouse described in Luke’s book, where Niall shoots George in self-defense.
• Niall then asked Luke and Camilla to come there and say that they were witnesses to the shooting and that Niall saved them.

Another seven years later:

• Niall is training other hostage negotiators.
• Charlie is in prison