Famous Last Words

by Gillian McAllister

fisselig. A German word meaning “flustered to the point of incompetence.”

I need to add this word to my vocabulary.

They were there before him, put their gun to the side.

I just don’t buy professional assassins “put their gun to the side.” It was imperative that A) Luke get a hold of the gun, and B) it is shown that Luke did NOT buy a gun, but this just doesn’t work.

His cheeks are pink, like a teething baby’s.

Cam and Luke love each other and deserve to be together. And so Niall does

it for the humanity of it: he does it for love.

The author says it’s a love story but the line works better as a lyric in a song by Meat Loaf.

She knows she ought to think about Polly, but she doesn’t. She thinks only of him, right in this moment. She will do her best, for Polly, to survive. But right now, on this weekday evening in London, the

The premise that a mother will place her husband over her child seems pretty wobbly in terms of verisimilitude.

night belongs to Luke, and to her, and to their love story.

gun held close to her body in the waistband of her shorts

The professional hit man lay a gun down and lose track of it, but a mom and literary agent tucks it in her waistband???

At the heart of this mystery was a book that

solved everything for her, the way they always do.

Too idyllic? Kind of like the whole love story premise?

They’re in a tiny, wooden room. Inside is a dirty old pillow, a sleeping bag, and a gun. There’s no natural light, only what filters in from

the streetlights outside. A slice catches Luke’s blue eyes that sheen gray. His eyes. There they are. She’d forgotten the precise shape of them.

Blech. Are sentences like this what makes a thriller “domestic”?

Eventually, the hit man put his weapon on a table, and I used the opportunity. Sprung in. Took the gun.

Nah

And that’s when he realizes it: the dreams weren’t the gunshots from the past; they were from the future. From now.

Huh?