Last Seen Leaving

When twenty-something drifter Miranda Cassidy wrecks her car one night on the way home from a bar, she seizes the accident as an opportunity to reinvent her life. Hitching a ride with a mysterious stranger, she finds quick work and a fresh start hundreds of miles away in an ocean-side vacation town, and she doesn't look back. Besides, she figures, who is going to miss her? But when her frantic mother finds no forwarding address, she senses something terrible has happened. Past secrets come crashing back. The memory of the tragic disappearance of Miranda's father years before and the force of long-buried emotions drive her on a frantic quest to find her daughter, no matter what the cost. As she did in her darkly thrilling debut, the cult favorite Josie and Jack, Braffet explores the often ambiguous nature of love and danger in a page-turner that will have readers riveted until the final twist.

Kelly Braffet's first novel, Josie and Jack, was published in 2005. It was praised as “wicked fun . . . a gothic tour of hell” (Los Angeles Times) and “a compelling study of love, hate, and psychopathic jealousy” (New York Post). Braffet was born in Long Beach, California, in 1976, and has lived in Arizona, rural Pennsylvania and Oxford, England. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, and has taught novel writing at the Sackett Street Writing Workshop. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Owen King.