There are many supporting characters who I am not going to get into suffice it to say that they are all well-drawn and fairly likeable, except the ones who are really, really unlikeable. Izzy was much more predictable, but that could just be because I was in her head, not Rae’s. It could also be Izzy, but the thing with Rae is that I never knew what she was going to do next. Rae is possibly Lisa Lutz’s most well-developed character in the series. Her options are graduate school, law school, or a career in “conflict resolution”/extortion. The Spellman family consists of parents Olivia and Albert, and three children: David, a successful lawyer Izzy, a not-so-successful PI/retired juvenile delinquent and Rae, who is twenty-two in this novel, and has just graduated from UC Berkeley and is trying to make up her mind about her future. Her narrative voice is sarcastic and hilarious and overall just something I enjoy reading. In this novel she is thirty-five years old when the series started she was twenty-eight. These novels are told in the first person Isabel “Izzy” Spellman is our narrator. But now is not the time for self-flagellation regarding my reading schedule. This last book was released in hardcover in the summer of 2013 and I obviously jumped right on reading it. I’ve been reading these books for a few years, but the last one I read was in 2012, about two months before we started the blog. They are about the Spellmans, a family of private investigators living in San Francisco. The Last Word: A Spellman Novel is the (probably) last book in a series of mystery novels written by Lisa Lutz. This is a confusing and somewhat annoying experience.

It appears to be my week to read and write about books that wrap up a series I’ve been reading for years but have never talked about on the blog.

Lisa lutz the spellman series