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At the start of Wendi Corsi Staub's latest work readers are introduced to a Southern family which has had more than its own share of tragedies. For Charlotte Remington it was the day when her little son drowned while swimming at the beach of a small island in the state of Georgia. She thought that her life would have been over had she not met a widower who had gone through the same type of tragedy. Together they found solace with one another and got married shortly thereafter. However Charlotte continues to struggle with letting go of the past and finding a way to connect to her rebellious teenage daughter who lost her brother on that sad day. The recent death of her uncle forces Charlotte to look at her life while living at her uncle's house. She is now at the forefront of a family feud after she is found to be the chief beneficiary of the family's estate, causing a lot of resentment inside her family. To make matters worse, someone has a bone to pick with the Remington family and has been plotting for years against them. Now the plan has come to fruition and Charlotte is caught in the middle of it. She is forced to look into her past in order to learn the truth of her family. If she doesn't, she might get caught on the killer's crosshairs and become the latest tragedy to happen to the Remingtons. The problem with this work is that it is overly ambitious. So much so, that the novel, at times, appears to be dragging on and on so that each character can get equal time in the book. Whether intentional or not, the author borrows (at the start of the book) too many elements form the works of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams in describing the Southern upper-class family that is the Remingtons. The novel also reads a lot like those best-selling 1970s novels involving family sagas and the secrets that threaten to destroy those families. The author here manages to keep the story contemporary and put the requisite twist and turns, plus a surprise or two, but unfortunately, that is not enough. THE FINAL VICTIM does not provide anything different to separate itself from those other books. That is what makes me sad about this book. Wendi Corsi Staub has written some good novels before. This just didn't happen to be one of them.
Reviewed by Angel L. Soto, March 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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