Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

This was one of the best true crime books I have ever read.
This was horrifyingly gripping from beginning to end. I was so easy to read and follow, it was told in such a logical way.
Obviously trigger warnings for death and murder, abduction and sexual assault.

This is a non fiction book which opens with a story about a young Lloyd Welch. He wanders into his local police station and tells detectives that he may well be a witness in the abduction and disappearance of sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyon. Aged 10 and 12 years respectively, Katherine and Sheila had not returned home after visiting their local mall to buy a couple of slices of pizza. Welch starts telling his ever changing story to detectives. He’s vague, inconsistent and rambling. Eventually the detectives lose patience with Welch and cut him loose. No one seems to pick up on the fact that he closely resembles an artist’s sketch of a man seen near the scene. The Lyons sisters are never found. Fast forward nearly 40 years and a cold case detective re-reading the file picks up on the connection. Lloyd Welch isn’t hard to find, he’s already serving a lengthy prison sentence. Detectives start interviewing him and so begins a lengthy game of cat and mouse as the cold case team gets to work with Lloyd Welch.

This is an absolutely fascinating and absorbing book. Steering well clear of any sensationalism or dramatics, this could’ve ended up a very different book in the hands of a lesser author. The detectives’ work is diligent and thorough, they’re in it for the long haul and this is very far from any movie where the criminal cops to his crime after half an hour of questioning. Detectives meet up with Welch several times, affecting various degrees of good cop/bad cop role play. Welch fancies himself the smartest guy in the room when in reality he’s no match for the combined efforts of the police forces determined to find justice for the Lyon family. That’s not to say Welch isn’t a tricky customer though. He lies and lies and lies again. He changes stories, tries to pin the blame on various family members and feigns amnesia. Welch’s family are almost worth a book on their own, colourful to say the least the detectives spend many hours digging into the tangled history of the Welch clan. All roads lead them back to Welch, however and I won’t say anymore as this is a story every reader needs to see unfold for themselves. Deserving of a place on any true crime booklist, this is an excellent book which is brilliantly written. Highly recommended.

I received a ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair review.

3.5 rounded down

The subtitle on the cover of The Last Stone is "a masterclass in criminal interrogation", and this is a wholly accurate description - this book is a feat in true crime writing in that the interviews with the prime suspect, Lloyd Welch, are meticulously detailed word-for-word by Bowden, from tapes of interviews which took place once the case was re-opened in 2013.

The crime Welch was accused of was not one I'd heard of before I read the book but one that shook the local community when it took place - on March 29 1975 two young girls, Sheila and Kate Lyon (aged 12 and 10) went missing from a mall near Washington DC. Three days later a young man, Lloyd Welch, visited police with a story of how he saw the two girls get into a strange man's car. The case then went cold until 2013, when local police took a fresh look at the suspects.

Bowden begins with some context in that he was a young reporter in the area when the crimes took place, then moves on to join the detectives in 2013. Welch was interviewed in various contexts by a core of three detectives who employed various tactics with varying levels of success. These interviews give police a bizarre thread of leads to follow up, mostly involving Welch's own family members.

The Last Stone makes for a compelling if frustrating read. My rating was rounded down because much of the book made me feel like I was banging my head against a brick wall - Welch talks a LOT, and it's impossible to ascertain what is fact and what is complete fabrication, and just when you think he has picked a story he's sticking with it changes again. Readers enjoyment will probably hinge on how much enjoyment they get from trying to pick truth out of Welch's various stories to get to the real facts of what happened.

This is a true crime book about a Cold Case. In 1975, two sisters, aged ten and twelve, disappeared from a shopping mall in Maryland. The girls are never found and nobody is ever charged with the crime. In 2013, a cold case detective, finds something previously overlooked, which links events to Lloyd Welch, currently in prison, for a crime against a child.

At first, the detectives hope that Welch will provide them with evidence implicating a man they felt was the main suspect. However, after initial interviews, it seems that Welch may be of more interest than they first imagined. Over the pages of this book, we see the investigators gradually try to get to the bottom of events, which happened nearly forty years before.

Welch is currently in prison, serving a thirty three year sentence for the sexual assault of a ten year old, but he can see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, as the questioning commences, it seems that, despite realising it is in his best interests not to reveal details of those events, Welch, firstly, can’t resist talking to the investigators and, two, is completely unable to keep his story straight. The investigators patiently, over a number of visits, tease details from Welch about the unsolved crime.

Now, for those who like books where everything is neatly tied up and packaged, this is not for you. Real life is rarely neatly ended and, those involved with this case, are to be applauded for trying to bring some resolution to the parents of those two girls. However, with so much time having passed, it is difficult for this to be resolved perfectly.

That said, I found this a fascinating glimpse into the case built up against the suspect, the way that the investigators did everything they could to try to discover what happened and how Welch was revealed as, not only a maladjusted individual, but as the member of an incredibly dysfunctional background. A fascinating, if difficult, read. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

I have never really been an aficionado of true crime books but as claimed this truly is a‘Masterpiece of Criminal Investigation.’

I have read a few books by Mark Bowden and recognise and applaud his ability as a wonderful writer of non-fiction.

This is a forensic re-eamination of a terrible unsolved crime that haunted him as a young cub reporter who covered the crime at the time and he follows the investigation as a cold case that is re-opened and finally solved.

The level of detail is exhausting and you can only pay tribute to the exhaustive patience and diligence of the police who finally got to the bottom of a terrible, terrible crime almost 40 years later.

I cannot say that I enjoyed this harrowing account but it is a fine addition to the ranks of true crime books.

There are certain crimes so horrific, so difficult to comprehend, that they stay in your memory, lingering somewhere at the back of your mind. Child abductions and murders are always particularly emotive, but when more than one child is taken, that really shocks us. How can, say, two individuals be snatched together, be killed together? How can that occur, and how do their families cope with such a horrific loss?

Of these relatively uncommon cases, a few come to mind immediately: the two Babes in the Wood cases for example (the first, where friends Susan Blatchford and Gary Hanlon were murdered in Epping Forest in 1970; the second 16 years later, when Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows were killed in Brighton), or the murders of sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes in 1956. In the latter case, it is partly the innocuousness of their last night that jars: a happy evening together at the cinema, watching an Elvis film for the 11th time before they disappeared, their bodies found a month later. They are tales of innocence that become tales of guilt, where family members and even the victims themselves are subject to rumour, innuendo, or character assassinations, despite their ages.

One of the cases that I’ve read about and has disturbed me particularly is that of the Lyon sisters. Sheila and Kate Lyon were 12 and 10 when they walked half a mile from their Maryland home to the local shopping mall in 1975, aiming to wander round and grab a pizza one day during their school holidays. They never came home, and their bodies have never been found. I initially read about the case a few years ago, and so when a man pleaded guilty to their murders, 42 years later, I felt both a sense of surprise at someone being sentenced for the crimes so long after the events, but also unease, unsure of how this one individual could have committed not one, but two, murders on his own.

Now a book is being published that aims to show the process by which this individual, Lloyd Welch, was investigated, charged and convicted - and it looks into what his exact role probably was; no mean feat seeing that Welch, as the book shows, was an inveterate liar, whose stories frequently changed, making it hard to determine the truth.The book, The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation, is by local journalist Mark Bowden, who at the time of the girls’ disappearance was a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper.

Firstly, a warning. Although the book’s subtitle is ‘a masterpiece of criminal interrogation’, and it is largely edited and structured transcripts of the police interviews with Lloyd Welch, to me it shows anything but a masterpiece of criminal interrogation. In fact, what struck me reading it was what dangerous ground the police were on with their questioning.There are leading questions, false promises, trying to force Welch into giving them the narrative they want. You get the distinct impression that he is trying to appease them by simply telling them the stories they asked for - if they suggest another individual is involved, he agrees, weaving them into his narrative.

What strikes you is that the police officers who interviewed him over months and months were very lucky to get him charged, and even luckier for him to plead guilty - as if he hadn’t, I am not sure he would have been found guilty by a jury once the manner of the interviewing had been looked into by the defence (and one interview was indeed ruled inadmissible beforehand, for various errors including the police not giving Welch a solicitor when he asked for one).

The book is useful in its exploration of how Welch's constantly changing stories had key elements that remained the same, and that these often reflected what the reality was; and how the police did pick up on these consistencies. I was left, however, still disturbed by the nature of the questioning, and the tactics used, although this might well reflect differences between how police in the US conduct investigations compared to police where I am, in the UK.

So I’m not wholly sure that the book presents what it claims in its subtitle. However, if you leave that aside, and read the book for what it really is - an account not only of what did probably happen to the sisters (there is a plausible account of what happened to Kate, but far more doubt with regard to Sheila, and I’m not wholly convinced by the theory offered in the book), but of the nature of kinship, family and community in rural areas of the US, it becomes an absorbing, if disturbing read.Stone adeptly shows the underbelly of American life - a world where child sex rings exist, where children are abducted and ‘sold’, sometimes killed once their use has ended.

This is also a world where families engaged in incest, where domestic violence is tolerated - even expected - and where there are dirty deeds that are commonly known ‘secrets’.This is a world suspicious of law enforcers, and who close ranks when one of their own is suspected of a crime, even when that crime is one as heinous as child rape and murder. This is the real story here: how a man - or men - can get away with murder for over four decades thanks to the peculiar morals his family lives by; and how such communities exist even in modern America.It also shows the danger of believing an elderly individual to be sweet and innocent, when their looks and demeanour were much different earlier in time. It also shows - defying the book’s subtitle - that an individual can be caught despite police mistakes or overly complex administrative procedures.

This book is not really about the five detectives who investigated Welch; despite being real, they are never portrayed in a three-dimensional way. Their breakthroughs seem more the result of fluke rather than masterly interrogation techniques, although you do get a sense of their frustration with lack of progress in a case that inevitably became a personal matter to them.However, it is a book that tells a gripping story of a cold case that looked like it might never be solved - and raises questions about how much there is still to be uncovered. It also makes horribly real the awful circumstances two innocent Maryland girls found themselves in back in 1975, and the distressing unknown that their family was left dealing with.

In turns gripping and revolting, Mark Bowden has penned an unputdownable page-turner of the first water.

The Last Stone gave a fascinating insight into a cold case investigation. At times the facts were disturbing, horrifying and sickenening but were part of the case so needed to be included. The detectives worked so hard to find out what had happened to two little sisters who had disappeared years before. What their poor family have gone through is heartbreaking.
How the detectives remained calm throughout their questioning of a suspect and his family is beyond me. The suspect was evil and a liar, game player and an attention seeker and he made my skin crawl.
Extremely well written.

I initially requested this book from NetGalley because I have an interest in true crime.

This book covers the investigation into the cold case of Katherine and Shiela Lyons, two little girls who went missing from a mall in 1975. The narrative begins with a police officer at the end of his career re-opening the case and discovering a new suspect. The narrative converges around the interrogation of Lloyd Welch.

The author, Mark Bowden, is a journalist who covered the disappearance at the time. He has been given access to the investigation/interrogation team along with video/transcripts from the interrogations themselves. The book is, by necessity, very dialogue heavy. There were points where I struggled to keep track of all the players in the narrative. However, the book was a compelling read from start to finish. I found reading the techniques used by the police really interesting and did find myself at points going ‘surely he’s not going to fall for that?!?’ in the way an outside observer does. I would have preferred the ending to be more precise but, as is the nature of true crime, sometimes you never will have all the answers. Real life is messy in a way that fiction is not. I would recommend it to any person interested in true crime or police procedure.