Nighttime on a dusty road in the English countryside finds a young woman scurrying from a rundown farmhouse. Her progress is impeded by her hobbled right foot, frequent checks over her shoulder for a pursuer and a desperate search for help. Suddenly, a pair of Land Rover headlights light her up. Her captor has caught her again, in the hard-to-put-down thriller The Last Thing to Burn.
Official-looking men approach the parents of Thanh and her sister, Kim-Ly, to offer the teenagers well-paying jobs in England. They'd work during the day and study at night for professional careers. But when the sisters arrive from Vietnam, Thanh is sold to a farmer named Lenn. In his house, she must always leave the bathroom door open, she must cook the way his mother did and she must submit herself sexually to him. Any pushback and Lenn burns a personal object of Thanh's. Cameras in the farmhouse monitor her while Lenn works in the fields and the footage is reviewed nightly. Thanh has been patiently planning an escape for years, but now she's pregnant, which makes any escape even more treacherous, perhaps fatal.
Authors are expected to be creative, but Will Dean (Dark Pines) exceeds all reader expectations in channeling the mind of a young, sex-trafficked Vietnamese woman desperately trying to hold on to her sanity. Thanh's horrific treatment and the countless plot twists threatening her plans make her eventual escape tear-inducing and universally satisfying. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer