Do you write book reviews on Goodreads or Amazon? Maybe just leave a star rating? Read The Last Word and you might think twice.

Emma Carpenter is living alone in a rented cabin on the coast of Washington. After experiencing a tragedy, she prefers to keep her own company, spending her time speed-reading through books on her Kindle. Her latest read, Murder Mountain, a horror novel by H. G. Kane, is so violently gruesome and poorly written that she’s inspired to leave a negative, one-star review on Amazon, leading to a war of words with the author who demands she remove the review. Their back and forth eventually leads to threats. But how worried should she be with the anonymity of the internet to protect her?

Soon, she begins experincing disturbances during the night. Strange appearances on her video doorbell, power outages, and evidence of someone else in the house. Now, just like the characters in Murder Mountain, Emma is in a fight for her life.

Taylor Adams’ other novels, No Exit and Hairpin Bridge, include scenes of violence that felt, to me, much more extreme than similar thrillers. Of course, I didn’t tell him I felt that way. The Last Word made me wonder how many others were more outspoken with their opinions.