Raven Books The Last Truths We Told Seriously good Sarah Vaughan.

by Holly Watt

The Last Truths We Told Seriously good Sarah Vaughan ABISBOOK Raven Books.

368 pages, Paperback

Published July 17, 2025

About the author

Hello!
My name is Holly Watt. The Good Listener is out in May 2026.
My first novel - To The Lions - won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the best thriller of the year. My second book, The Dead Line, was named one of the Thrillers of the Year by The Times and the FT. The Casey Benedict series continues with The Hunt and The Kill and The End of the Game.
Before writing novels, I was an investigative journalist. I started at the Sunday Times (long, complicated story), before moving to the Daily Telegraph.
During six years at the Telegraph, I was the Whitehall Editor and jointly ran the investigations team. I then moved to work on the Guardian's investigations team (yes, a bit of a leap politically...).
I worked on stories including MPs’ Expenses at the Telegraph and the Panama Papers at the Guardian and I also did lots of undercover work.
I've reported from countries all around the world, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Libya, Jordan and Lebanon (some of which appear in my books).
I now live in Dartmoor with my family and my badly behaved dog.

Reviews

[mrsbookburnee Niamh Burnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good thriller, I wasn’t really gripped by the characters, I felt like I was reading about teenagers, not adults in there late 30s and they were pretty unlikeable.

The most interesting part of the story was the predictions that were revealed at the start of the chapters.

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

★★★☆☆

The fact that I read this in one day does count for something - maybe that something is my four little brain cells were exhausted by feminist theory and Cormac McCarthy's language, but nevertheless, this was a good breather. Short chapters, easy to read, suspenseful-plot. Stunning.

However, if you have read In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and/or What Stays Unsaid, you have read this book already. A group of university friends (usually from a highly respected and elite university, e.g., Cambridge or the fictional Duquette) reunite in a secluded place after several years (or decades), and one of their original group has since died in the interim. You've got the slightly outcast, people-pleasing main character, the confident head of the group that everyone loves, and the rogue (usually drunk) character who stirs up all the drama. In this case, the setting is a secluded childhood mansion in Dartmoor (which also happens to be where What Stays Unsaid is set, just fyi.)

None of the above means this is a bad book per se - the characters a bit flat and predictable (and also do not act like they are in their forties??? Jude especially is very erratic and unrealistic for me), but the quick pace means it's easy to read and there aren't useless red herrings which is a pet peeve of mine. It's just that I have read it before. This offers nothing new to either of the aforementioned books, and it was clear who had done what and why before it was mentioned.

Reading this in one day was definitely the move, because I think I would have gotten a bit bored with it otherwise. If you haven't read books like the above, or if you really enjoyed those, then absolutely go ahead and read this - if you have, I would suggest branching out.

Thank you to Bloomsbury for gifting me this copy. All opinions are my own.

cw// mentions of suicide, rape, assault and murder