By Emily Arsenault; HarperCollins, July 2018
In recent years, the issue of mental health as it relates to violent crime has been thrust into the spotlight, with crimes in schools and the workplace being a specific hot-button topic. It seems you can’t turn on the news these days without hearing of some new atrocity being committed by someone described as mentally ill, disturbed, or unstable. While politicians and pundits hurl accusations at one another as to who is to blame, very little focus seems to be put on the actual treatment of mental illness, and where the responsibility lies for that treatment. The end result of avoiding that tricky subjects is the main focus of Emily Arsenault’s new novel, The Last Thing I Told You.
The story revolves around two separate but connected events: a shooting in a retirement home five years prior that left ten dead and seven injured, and the recent murder of a therapist in his own office. The narrative switches between two different individuals, both with very unique perspectives on the crimes. The first narrator is Henry Peacher, a local cop who stopped the retirement home shooter years prior, and is now assigned to investigate the therapist’s murder. The other narrator is Nadine Raines, a former patient of the therapist as a troubled teen; now in her thirties, she is back in town for the holidays and is one of the last people to see the doctor alive. As the story bounces between detective and suspect, you get an overview of a mental health system that has let multiple people down—not just the patients themselves, but also the people surrounding those patients who eventually landed in harms’ way.
While The Last Thing I Told You is basically a whodunit-style thriller, I found the underlying story of how those with mental illness are treated, both by society and the medical profession, to be the more arresting theme of the book. Within the novel, you can see where a little more oversight and attention, a little more care, might have not just helped one individual, but saved multiple lives down the road. A few years ago, this novel might have been considered a type of cautionary tale. Now, it feels all too real.
