
One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of 2017
When a scandalous small-town crime goes viral, a teen girl takes center stage in Rosecrans Baldwin's story of a twenty-first century Puritan witch-hunt. The Last Kid Left begins when a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl. The police find two bodies in the trunk. 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder, and after details of the crime rip across the internet, his 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis--a sheltered teen who's been off the grid until now, her first romance coinciding with her first cellphone--is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not. Emily and Nick are not the only ones whose lives come unmoored. A retired police officer latches onto the case. Nick's alcoholic mother is thrust into an unfamiliar role. A young journalist who left her hometown behind is pulled into the fray. And Emily's father, the town Sheriff, is finally forced to confront a monstrous secret. The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, an expertly-portrayed account of tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it's the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that's more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it's the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them.A 2017 Best Book of the Season by Vanity Fair, Fast Company, The Boston Globe, The New York Post, The Chicago Review of Books, Mystery Tribune, and O. Henry Magazine
One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2017 A coming-of-age tale so decisively of our time that it's almost surprising that it doesn't rely on a dystopian veneer to carry its themes. It is a wonder and a pleasure to see a work of fiction that so honestly, accurately, and effortlessly belongs to the here and now in ways that neither trivialize its horrors nor play them to their apocalyptic hilt. --The Los Angeles Review of Books "If The Scarlet Letter were reported to TMZ, the result might have something of the flavor of Baldwin's complexly plotted literary mystery."--Library Journal "[A] well-crafted mystery...readers who like plenty of character analysis in their crime fiction will be satisfied."--Publishers Weekly A dark and brooding narrative...Baldwin's novel steers clear of tidy endings, remaining faithful to delivering a story that ebbs and flows with the messiness of real life.--BookPage When teen Nick is arrested for murder and the case goes viral, both his family and his girlfriend are thrust into the spotlight. --Entertainment Weekly (Best Books of the Month) Bracing . . . The Last Kid Left is The Scarlet Letter by way of one of Michael Connelly's Bosch novels, one part study of herd mentality and one part procedural. --The Los Angeles Times Rosecrans Baldwin drives a modern murder mystery in The Last Kid Left."