Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger Review: A Taut, Layered Psychological Thriller

At the center of Last Girl Ghosted is Wren Greenwood, a 28-year-old New York advice columnist and podcaster known to her audience as "Dear Birdie." So consumed is she by other people's personal lives that her own has been put on hold — until her friend Jax convinces her to try the dating app Torch. There, Wren encounters Adam Harper: enigmatic, brooding, and quoting Rilke in his profile. For a few months, the relationship is everything. Then Adam disappears entirely — his profile deleted, his phone disconnected. What begins as heartbreak turns sharply darker when Wren starts receiving strange texts from unknown numbers and catches glimpses of a tall figure watching her. The situation reaches a new level of menace when private detective Bailey Kirk arrives, asking about another woman who matched with someone resembling Adam — a woman who has since vanished. The thriller's engine is the question of who Adam Harper really is and how many women he has left behind.

Published by Park Row Books, Last Girl Ghosted arrives from a writer who has built a sustained reputation in the psychological suspense space. Publishers Weekly identifies Unger as a Thriller Award finalist and notes the novel follows Confessions on the 7:45, situating this book as part of a mature, productive run in the genre. Shelf Awareness described it as "a deliciously complex psychological thriller featuring a New York advice columnist and the intriguing online suitor who ghosts her." The novel taps into a specifically contemporary unease — the opacity of online identities, the ease with which a person can simply cease to exist digitally — and channels it into something with genuine narrative stakes. Its setting in the world of apps, podcasts, and curated digital personas gives the story a cultural currency that distinguishes it from more timeless-feeling domestic thrillers.

Kirkus Reviews praised Unger's construction of Wren's first-person narration as skillful, noting that she creates "an engaging, witty character" while "only slowly revealing that she has secrets of her own." That structural choice — the narrator who is herself unrevealed — is central to the novel's design. The thriller operates on the principle that almost no one is who they appear to be, a conceit that extends beyond Adam Harper to Wren herself and the cast around her. Kirkus further commended the way tension and revelation accumulate toward the final chapters, writing that in this book Unger "spins like Simone Biles — and sticks the landing," a pointed acknowledgment that the climax delivers on its setup rather than collapsing under the weight of its own misdirection. For a subgenre prone to third-act fumbles, that is a meaningful distinction.

Readers who prefer thrillers driven by procedural logic or external detective work may find the novel's weight of secrets — Wren's, Adam's, the wider cast's — demanding in terms of sustained suspension of disbelief. Critical coverage, while calling it "enthralling," also categorized a later Unger title as "credulity-challenging" in a separate review, a recurring note in commentary on her work that suggests the elaborate architecture of her plots can test some readers' patience for coincidence and concealment stacked high. Those who want their psychological thrillers lean and stripped back may find the layering of hidden pasts across multiple characters to be more elaborate than necessary, even as others will read it as richly plotted.

Last Girl Ghosted is designed for readers who want their suspense rooted in character interiority as much as external menace — those who find online dating culture's particular brand of anonymity genuinely unsettling will find the novel's premise especially resonant. Fans of first-person psychological thrillers in which the narrator is complicit in the mystery, rather than a clean observer of it, are the novel's natural audience. The trade paperback edition, published by Park Row on September 6, 2022, makes it readily accessible for book club consideration, where the novel's questions about identity, trust, and the self we present online offer plenty to discuss beyond the plot mechanics.