Our Last Wild Days by Anna Bailey (with Ginny) #20BooksofSummer2025 No 6

So that’s 7 books read – I hope to fit in an 8th before the month is out, but have a couple of review copies to cover first. But I’m on track for my 20 books with the holidays and more reading time to come soon. Time for a review, accompanied by a photo from my ‘Reading in bed with Harry or Ginny’ series I’ve started.

I know this novel was published in April this year, but it counts towards my 20 books from last year and earlier, as I received a proof copy in late autumn. English author Anna Bailey lived in Texas and Colorado for a while after graduating and used their experience of small-town life to inspire their rather good debut novel Tall Bones, which I read a few summers ago.

Their third novel is set in the swampland of Louisiana. As it begins, we meet Marianne ‘Cutter’ Labasque, who is delivering gator meat to the town diner. Cutter and her two brothers, the older Dewall and the younger Beau, grew up out in the swamp on a gator farm. Their parents died ‘when their car came off the interstate at a hundred miles an hour,’ leaving the siblings to carry on the business such as it was.

The diner is the source of all the local gossip, and Cutter overhears someone say that Loyal May is back home from Nashville to look after her ‘nutso’ mother who has signs of dementia. Cutter doesn’t want to bump into her until her current mess is sorted out. Loyal, the fat girl, and Cutter the swamp girl, both outsiders at school, had been best of friends. But it hadn’t been easy for Loyal had part of her palm and little finger bitten off one hand by one of the Labasques captive alligators when she was 17. In Nashville, Loyal had been a great journalist in the making, and back in Jacknife, she’s going to work for the Bayou Leader, the region’s only newspaper – a two-man band run by Chuck De Foret and his nephew Sasha.

‘We got a body. A floater in the river.’ The young man with the badly dyed hair looks up as Loyal walks through the office door, and his shoulders sag a little. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I thought you were my uncle.’
‘I’m here, Sasha, I’m here.’ Chuck De Foret pushes through the door after Loyal, close enough that she can smell the margarita-in-a-can she’d watched the editor knock back in the parking lot, while she sat waiting for him to finish before she got out of the car.

That body is Cutter, the police put it down as suicide, looking for easy answers to write the case off. Loyal is sure it isn’t, and though suspicion naturally falls on Dewall, for although they worked together hunting gators, the bond between brother and sister was a rocky one. Beau is a meth-head, and incapable of doing anything. She starts to investigate… Chuck reminds her constantly that what she’s doing is verging into police work, not journalism, and that she should leave it to them, but how can Loyal let the death of her best friend go unavenged – she needs to uncover what happened and catch the murderer. Teaming up with Sasha, another misfit, they’re on the case, wherever it takes them – and will uncover much corruption and many secrets putting them in danger too. Dewall, however, proves to have an enigmatic side to him talking of the fabled albino gator living somewhere deep in the swamp …

Dewall wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his forearm. ‘This place,’ he says, ‘ain’t as untamed as people think. We’re already breathing factory air, drinking factory water – they’ll build a factory on top of us one of these years, just you wait. We’re living our last wild days, boy. And that ghost gator, she’s a relic – something left of the strange beauty of this back-country. So may I am looking, but just to see her. I’m used to looking at things I can’t have.’

The fetid, and now polluted by the factory alluded to, waters, aromas and bug-laden vapours of the swamp pour off the page in this novel, with the gators adding extra menace; life is brutal here. The sense of place was brilliantly done and it is full of Southern Gothic atmosphere. The Labasques, Loyal and Sasha are all fully-rounded with a plethora of supporting characters giving extra colour and yet more menace to the novel. I particularly liked Sasha, who as a young gay man, needs to find his place in this unforgiving world, and I found myself growing to appreciate the finer qualities of Dewall too, who has hidden depths under this he-man exterior and angry demeanor.

I managed to miss Bailey’s second novel Where the Truth Lies. It appears to be out of print, but I shall look out for it, as well as their next books. This was my 6th of my 20 Books of Summer, and also fits in with National Crime Reading Month.

Source: Review copy – thank you! Doubleday hardback, 320 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)