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Published Jul 2013
352 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
Isabel Spellman PI, is used to being followed, extorted, and questioned - all occupational hazards of working at her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Her little sister, Rae, once tailed Izzy for weeks on end to discover the identity of Izzy's boyfriend. Her mother, Olivia, once blackmailed Izzy with photographic evidence of Prom Night 1994. It seemed that Spellman vigilance would dissipate after Izzy was fired for breaching client confidentiality, but then Izzy avenged her dismissal by staging a hostile takeover of the company. She should have known better than to think she could put such shenanigans behind her.
In The Last Word, Izzy's troubles are just beginning. After her takeover of Spellman Investigations, her employees are the furthest thing from collegial ... and Izzy finds herself struggling to pay the bills. But when she is accused of embezzling from a former client, the ridiculously wealthy Mr. Slayter, the stakes become immense. If Izzy gets indicted, she could lose her PI license and the Spellman family's livelihood, not to mention her own freedom. Is this the end of Izzy Spellman, PI?
The Last Word is, hands down, the most powerful book in the bestselling, award-nominated Spellman series.
"Another fizzy round of Mystery Lite ... Izzy seems even more dissociated than in her previous five outings, though fans will either cheer or not notice." - Kirkus
"Lutz delivers another rollicking good time in her sixth novel featuring the wacky San Francisco family of PIs." - Publishers Weekly
"The Last Word is Raymond Chandler meets Arrested Development. Zany, witty and full of dark surprises, Lisa Lutz's novel is pure fun - and Izzy Spellman, PI, tops the list of 'Fictional Characters I'd Like to Meet for a Bourbon.'" - Gillian Flynn, New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl
"The sly trick of Lisa Lutz's Spellman novels is that they're so funny and so smart that you're taken by surprise by all the insights they offer - about loneliness, about the tumult of love and most of all about the tender chaos of families. Like Raymond Chandler-meets-Salinger's Glass family, with The Last Word, Lutz offers her richest, funniest and most bittersweet Spellman tale to date." - Megan Abbott, author of The End of Everything and Dare Me
This information about The Last Word was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: David Middleton
Lisa Lutz is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including The Passenger (2016), How to Start a Fire, six novels in the Spellman books series, and Heads You Lose, co-authored with David Hayward. She is also the author of the children's book, How to Negotiate Everything, illustrated by Jaime Temairik. Lutz has won the Alex award and has been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Although she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, the University of Leeds in England, and San Francisco State University, she still does not have a bachelor's degree. Lisa spent most of the 1990s hopping through a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting the screenplay Plan B, a mob comedy. After the film was made in 2000, she vowed she would never write another screenplay...
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