Her Last Breath (by Taylor Adams)
After loving No Exit, I decided I needed to read the rest of Taylor Adams’s books. When the audiobook of Her Last Breath became available on Libby, I placed a hold.
Tess, a shy and claustrophobic legal assistant, finally agrees to go caving with her glamorous best friend Allie, a successful travel influencer whose life has pulled far ahead of hers. In a remote Washington cave system called the Devil’s Staircase, a stranger confronts them at the entrance. Allie talks back. He retaliates. Soon Tess is trapped in a tight crawl space hundreds of feet underground, fighting to stay alive.
Hours later she is the only one who makes it out. As she tells her story to a detective, details about Allie’s past begin to surface and the attack looks less and less random. The question hanging over the rest of the book is whether Tess left the danger behind when she crawled back to the surface.
I wanted to like this one more than I did.
Adams knows how to wring tension out of a tight space, and the cave setting is the strongest part of the novel. Tess and Allie’s trip into the Devil’s Staircase is unique and genuinely frightening. I already had no interest in squeezing through confined passages, and this book only confirmed it. I’ll stick to the big, wide-open tours at Mammoth Cave here in Kentucky—which I was glad to see mentioned. As a reader looking for an intense, claustrophobic experience, those underground scenes delivered.
The problem for me was how early I could see where the story was headed. The setup telegraphed the outcome from the beginning. Adams is a skilled constructor of suspense, and the last stretch does bring some surprising turns that made the book more interesting. Even so, the predictability undercut a lot of the tension.
Sophie Amoss’s narration was just okay. It took me a while to settle into her voice and actually get absorbed in the story.
Her Last Breath is well written and well built as a thriller. I found it enjoyable. I just didn’t like it as much as No Exit, and I kept wishing I liked this one more than I did.
Linked below are my reviews of other books by Taylor Adams.
Tess and Allie can have the caves — I'll stay above ground with my Labyrinth dahlias.
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