As 28-year-old Tess DeWater leaves her apartment one morning, she predicts, “Today was going to be dangerous, but her nerves would keep her sharp.” Readers should heed this same warning as they begin Taylor Adams’ brilliant suspense novel Her Last Breath. After Tess and her longtime best friend Allie Merritt enter a remote cave in Oregon, their outing turns unexpectedly perilous. Like Adams’ The Last Word and No Exit, this outstanding thriller will frazzle readers’ nerves with visceral details and endless twists and turns—this time around involving both the cave and the novel’s plot.
Law student Tess is a self-proclaimed coward and control freak who sees Allie as “a supernatural creature, perfect and graceful and somehow never afraid.” In addition to being an experienced caver, Allie is an international adventure traveler and influencer with a devoted—and profitable—following.
“They say this cave is a portal to Hell, you know,” Allie says as the friends enter the ominously nicknamed Devil’s Staircase. Soon, they are confronted by a man clad in black, complete with rubber gloves, a balaclava and an overly familiar air. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game whose tensions ratchet up as the women descend deeper inside the “complex web of tunnels, honeycombed with multiple routes, switchbacks, and hidden passages.” Adams adeptly brings every physical aspect of his setting (bats, spiders, frigid water, narrow passages leading to dead ends) to bear on the psychological torment of his characters.
Crafting phenomenal descriptions and riveting action scenes, Adams is a masterful plotter who nimbly juggles multiple point-of-view characters throughout. In fact, the prologue takes the perspective of Detective Layla Washington, who carefully questions hospitalized Tess about what happened inside the cave. Washington is a calm, skillful inquisitor who is “used to being underestimated, and she even likes it.” The book’s structure alternates between the cave and the hospital bedside, helping to ease narrative tension and deepen the mystery of the events in question.
Her Last Breath has so many twists and turns that it’s impossible to see what’s coming, and readers will feel as if they themselves are trapped within the Devil’s Staircase. What Stephen King did for an empty hotel in The Shining, Adams does for a treacherous cave in this bracing and breathtaking thriller.