Fascinating read. Mark Bowden is so meticulous in his writing. I have read ever one of his books, and this one is just as good as all the otjers.

I’m a lover of true crime. Borderline obsessed with trying to solve the cases before the detectives. This was a long, drawn out and confusing case. Nothing makes sense. At times it was very hard to continue reading this book due to the monotonous and every changing timeline. Crimes that involve kids always get to me. This story is no different. If you expect resolution. You won’t get it with this story. You’ll end up with more questions that you started with.

This book is a true crime story about the disappearance of two sisters from a Wheaton, Maryland mall way back in March of 1975. Katherine and Sheila Lyons, 10 and 12 were seen with a man and then vanished. It became a cold case that journalist Mark Bowden became interested in and sank his teeth into. It’s a different kind of true crime book, as it pits five bulldog detectives against one of the most determined liars they’ve ever run into, after sifting through other possible leads. It becomes almost a battle of wills as the interrogations play out, the detectives trying to find the bodies of the girls after decades of others failing. I found this a compelling crime read that really held my interest very well, especially the use of different kinds of interrogation techniques, what is allowed and what is not. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Mark Bowden, and the publisher for my fair review.

In 1975 sisters Sheila and Kate Lyon went missing from a Wheaton MD mall. The girls, 12 and 10 were never heard from again. Thirty-nine years later the cold case files were reviewed by a new group of detectives who focused in on a new suspect, an incarcerated man named Lloyd Welch.📖

If you like the gritty side of police detective work and love true crime then this is a great read. Mark Bowden is probably most acclaimed for Black Hawk Down but long before that he was a young newspaper reporter struggling to get ahead. In 1975 he wrote about the missing girls for the Baltimore News-American, his first chance to write front page news. Thus began Bowden’s interest in the long unsolved case. In this book he follows the newly opened case as detectives focus in on Welch and try to break his story. 📖

I would recommend this to readers who liked I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. Thanks to @groveatlantic and @netgalley for the #advancereaderscopy.

Detailed, well written, and I enjoyed reading it even though it’s a sad story. I am an avid true crime reader so I can be pretty picky. I would recommend this book to any true crime buff.

This masterful piece of journalism investigates the conclusion to a gut-wrenching true crime story that unfolded in 1975 and continued to wreak havoc on the victims’ lives for over forty years. Unlike other true crime narratives I’ve read, The Last Stone focuses on the recorded dialogue and interrogation techniques from the hundreds of hours of interviews done with the suspects in the disappearance of Sheila and Kate Lyon.

Bowden skillfully mends together the many layers and numerous individuals involved, which to me is the mark of a great non-fiction writer. I found the story easy to follow because of and not despite Bowden’s writing. With decades of information to sift through, this is no small feat for an author. The book has the objective voice of a journalist while still granting due praise to the dedicated investigators involved. It is clear that Bowden has years of experience in this type of reporting.

This book was ultimately satisfying and will, of course, appeal to readers who enjoy true crime. It will also appeal to those who prefer to listen to true crime podcasts or watch true crime television to consume these types of stories - it is comprehensive, yet succinct, and wraps up very neatly.

Thank you very much to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

3 stars
Massive trigger alert for victims of sexual assault.

This is a very hard book to read. It relates the horrifying tales of the kidnapping,rape an murder of two young sisters. This book is filled with the brutally graphic details of the sexual assault of the accused man's step daughter. It's horrifying and should not be included in the book.
The author has done a good job of relaying the story, the people involved an the aftermath of this tragic crime.
I just can't 're immensely it due to th intimate inclusion of details not related to this crime that should not be included in this book.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a honest review.

Author Mark Bowden must have spent many a sleepless night writing this book. He details the case of two little girls who were kidnapped from a shopping mall and never seen again --- except by the criminal ring that held them, abused them, and finally killed them in a manner so vicious that the reader can hardly imagine it. Detail by detail, the detective team walks a suspected witness through his ever-changing tales to ferret out what is true from what is false. What is most interesting is how the detectives work this man, who is in prison, to sift through the patterns inherent in his stories to intuit the truth and to use his lies to propel him into revealing more possible facts that will bring the team to conclude this this cold case at last. The result is shocking. That there are sociopaths like this living among us is truly frightening. Thank god for great police work!

I think this may be one of the best crime books I've ever read. It takes you into the interrogation room with the detectives, which was fascinating. The hours that went into this case are mind-boggling, but the result is what counts. They got their man!

(1 1/2). The research to put together this book must have been overwhelming, as there had to have been a huge number of numbing hours listening to tapes and reading transcripts of interviews. The cold case story is noteworthy, but the detail is so deep and slow moving that I did not find it nearly as interesting as most of the other true crime books I have read.

The Last Stone by Mark Bowden is the true crime story of two missing young girls from 1975.

I think I have read everything written by this author, he has yet to disappoint me. This is not a bang bang shoot-em up but rather a slow and unstoppable slide 40 years later in to the evil that surrounds us and often effects the most vulnerable like Katherine Lyon and her twelve-year-old sister Shelia Lyon . This is truly a WOW READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mark Bowden, a journalist, got interested in a case about two missing girls, 10 year old and 12 year old sisters. In 1975 they were taken from a mall in Washington DC and nothing was ever found and eventually the case was dropped. In 2013 the case was reopened when new evidence surfaced and again Mark picked up the story. Detectives began questioning an inmate Lloyd Welch who was imprisoned for child molestation in Delaware. It took months to unravel what happened to the two girls that day, but Lloyd was a talker and gave the detectives a lot of information. Many other names were associated with the case and slowly a timeline was established. This book is by a journalist, so is written in a journalistic style. We follow the story from when the sisters arrived at the mall to the ultimate confession. There are obviously a lot of unanswered questions due to the 38 years between the kidnapping and the interviews, but the book is still interesting, sad and horrific.
Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for giving me the ARC for my honest review.

A true crime story about the abduction of two little girls, and the cold case detectives who struggled to solve the mystery. A very dark tale, well-written and compelling.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I just finished this book. What a horrendous crime. The book centered on the many interrogations with Lloyd and his role in the crime. It was a different kind of book than I imagined and the ending was not as satisfying as I had hoped. I am haunted by the crime.

This is a book about the power of perseverance on the part of many people. Almost 44 years ago, on the 29th March, 1975 two young sisters went to the mall and never returned. Although their parents continued to wait patiently for local law enforcement to find out what happened to their daughters the case wasn't solved and gradually sank to the bottom of the pile.

With the advances in science and the resurrection of many cold cases however, in 2013 it became active again with five experienced detectives concentrating on its resolution. The story of their dogged determination to see this case through to a conclusion is brilliantly put together by Mark Bowden who reported on the initial disappearances and was ultimately able to bring things to a close in this excellent book.

Bowden was able to draw extensively on the years of recordings made of the interrogations of convicted child molester Lloyd Welch, as well as those conducted with his family. He was then able to show how things finally began to come together as the experienced team worked tirelessly to sift through the lies and misleading half-truths to reach a outcome worse than any fiction.

I was able to read an advanced copy of this book thanks to Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an unbiased review and would recommend it to anyone true crime aficionado who enjoys the minutiae of investigations and the dismantling of the psyche of those who practice to deceive.

I can hear the grainy echos and the high screech of the shifting chairs on the cement floor. The claustrophobic walls of the interview room closing in on the prisoner, yet his lies and manipulations always trying to pick their way out...

The Last Stone tells the story of a forty year old disappearance of two girls from a mall just outside of Washington DC. Bowden was a cub reporter on the morning crime beat at that time. He remembers the first several weeks of the investigation. The fieldwork, the interviews, the anonymous tips, and even when a psychic was consulted. Unfortunately, the leads ran dry. The case remained open and several cold case detectives tried their hand at finding the truth, but it wasn't until one piece of evidence came bubbling back up to the surface that investigators had something to go on.

Now enters a man already serving a long sentence for child molestation, Lloyd Welch. As a young man he came forward with information about a possible abduction. He said he saw the girls in the mall that day, and maybe he even could identify the car they were taken in. Yet, when he is reinterviewed over the course of many months, his story starts to change. They name him as a "person of interest," and his life in prison starts to get a little less comfortable. Detectives investigate his family, an insular Appalachian clan, and a pincher strategy comes into play. Welch's lies and manipulations are not as strong as they use to be. His hold on his innocence may be slipping.

Three quarters of this story is told through dialogue within the investigation room. The waves of questions that hit him, worded twelve different ways by 5 different investigators, and sweetened by bags of junk food.. Yes, going over the evidence over and over again did become repetitive, but it is only in the telling of the questioning many times verbatim does the reader get a true sense for the tireless work the team did on this case.  The only thing I would have liked was a little about the psychology of lying, maybe a bit of some expert opinion on the ways of the sociopath. 

With a chilling cast, a backwoods setting, and shifting truths, The Last Stone reads like a season of True Detective. It is a truly dark, yet an immersive read that gets to the real evil of people's souls

4.5 out of 5 stars

I normally love true crime, but I found this dull and tedious. And, frankly, not much new material here that i couldn't pull of the Internet.
More focus on the victims would have increasee my interest.
I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Easy to get bogged down in the frustration the investigators experienced. Ebook need a lot of editing fixes.

The Last Stone by Mark Bowden is the true crime story of two missing young girls from 1975.

On March 25, 1975, ten-year-old Katherine Lyon and twelve-year-old Shelia Lyon went missing from a Wheaton, Maryland shopping mall. Through the intervening decades, numbers of police officers and others continued to attempt to solve this disappearance, with the case being set aside, re-opened and examined again and again.

In reviewing the case file, an overlooked interview of a man named Lloyd Welch is re-examined and breathes new life into the investigation. Back in 1975, Lloyd Welch, for unclear reasons, interjected himself into the investigation by claiming to have witnessed an older man pestering the girls at the mall. Through the previous further investigation of Welch's claims, it is determined his claim was a fabricated encounter, possibly made for the purpose of seeking attention.

Decades later, Welch's interview is re-examined and when it is learned Welch is currently incarcerated in prison for child molestation, detectives seek to re-interview him in hopes that he may have more information than he originally revealed.

This then starts a renewed investigation into the decades-old disappearance that leads to mountain hollers in Virginia and Maryland and reveals a clannish Welch family with many hidden secrets.

The novel depicts a fascinating, over a year long, interrogation process involving incarcerated Lloyd Welch. The investigation soon envelopes the Welch clan, which includes some of the most despicable family members one could imagine.

This true crime accounting is compelling and easily one of the best true crime books in some time and as with his other non-fiction books, Mark Bowden again crafts a book that is highly interesting and hard to put down.

On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, age 10 and 12, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware.

Thank you to net galley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this book it was a great experience