The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave

Nora Noone is a busy architect who recently started her own firm, specializing in building spaces that promote healing, while her equally ambitious fiancé is a chef with a small but highly regarded restaurant in Brooklyn. She is meeting with a new client when her half-brother Sam appears to say he needs her help because he thinks their father’s recent death was not an accident. 

Their father, Liam Noone, a self-made hospitality mogul, fell to his death at Windbreak, his cliffside cottage in California. For Nora, who also lost her mother (his first wife) recently, it has been a painful time and she has coped by bottling up her feelings.

Because this is what I keep thinking: What happens if you lose your own axis? Since my parents died, that’s how it feels. That the axis on which I spun – like a certain angle of light, like a prayer – is gone. I can’t find it. I’m not even sure it still exists.

I think of Sam’s question to me about Jack. I think of my steadying and true answer. Yes, I want to marry him. I want to be with him and keep loving him. But what if that’s true and there’s still nothing I can do about the other part? The part that keeps me isolated from him – all my grief, all its ache – erecting an invisible wall that I can’t seem to climb over.

She is not interested in teaming up with Sam, whom she barely knows. but somehow she ends up on a plane to LAX with him the next morning. Instead of enabling Nora to dismiss Sam’s concerns, their visit to Windbreak and meeting with the local police makes them more suspicious.

The story is told in flashbacks to Liam’s life over the years, his upbringing in Midwood, Brooklyn, and his determination to escape from there, and the secrets about what mattered most to him, which he kept from his three wives and three children. I wasn’t as convinced by his big secret or its significance as I was by the way Nora pieces together what happened to him, and I also liked how she slowly builds a relationship with her half-brother. The emphasis of her focus on healing spaces when she had difficulty healing herself is a bit heavy handed (plus, at the end, she seems to have turned her back on many of her clients). There were holes in the plot, some annoying red herrings, and pretentious self-help language I could have done without but, overall, I thought the book was well done, if not as original or compelling as the author’s bestseller, The Last Thing He Told Me (my review)(a sequel is forthcoming).  There are times when you want to say in exasperation, “Why can’t you all communicate?” or “Why would you marry person x if you love person y?” but then there might not be a plot or a book!

This is my first mystery of the year for Carol’s Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.   It was also one of the big Fall 2024 books I was looking forward to.  This is my third book by Dave: in 2012, I read The First Husband but must admit I have no recollection of it at all.

Title: The Night We Lost Him
Author: Laura Dave
Narrator: Julia Whelan
Publication: Simon & Schuster, audiobook, 2024
Genre: Suspense
Source: Library

Off the Blog: On Sunday, my mother and I paid our respects to President Jimmy Carter by signing the condolence book in his memory at the Kennedy Library. Joan Vennochi has a good column in the Boston Globe today contrasting Carter's truth-telling to Trump's lies, concluding, "With Carter, Americans did come to respect his virtue — after they kicked him out of the White House. His long, post-presidential life of service and commitment to truth-telling is now celebrated, a truth recognized even by Trump."