When The Last Flight by veteran best-selling novelist Julie Clark appeared in 2020, it was immediately hailed as a must-read mystery thriller. Not only was it a New York Times best seller, but it made numerous best-of-summer reading lists, including Amazon, People, and Good Morning, America’s. Born of the #MeToo movement (as its dedication page attests), The Last Flight explores women’s desperate survival strategies when caught within the machinations of brutal and violent men. In adopting a narrative structure in which the point of view alternates chapter to chapter between the two women, the novel lays bare The Corrosive Effects of Secrets in relationships as well as the powerful lure of the chance to start over (and The Pretty Lie of Escape). Ultimately, the novel celebrates the resilience of women and The Power of Female Solidarity in a patriarchal culture still unwilling to see women as anything but commodities. 

This study guide uses the 2021 Sourcebooks Landmark paperback edition of The Last Flight.

Content Warning: This guide contains extensive references to domestic abuse and drug addiction.

Plot Summary

The Last Flight is a split narrative, the point of view shifting between two women: Claire Cook, the wife of a prominent New York philanthropist with political ambitions, and Eva James, a thirty-something woman entangled in a vast and dangerous drug operation in Oakland, California. For different reasons—Claire’s husband abuses her, Eva’s drug operations are being tracked by the feds—both women need to disappear and start a new life.

For months Claire plans her escape; she squirrels away money and purchases fake identification papers. She plans to use a trip to Detroit on behalf of one of her husband’s charities (a charter school that the Cook Foundation funds) as her chance and sends ahead her new identity papers and the money to the Detroit hotel. Her plan then is to disappear into Canada under the name “Amanda Burns.” However, at the last minute her husband changes her assignment: She will now attend a conference in Puerto Rico. Her plan in ruins, she is devastated.

For reasons that are not yet clear, Eva has arranged to stumble across Claire at JFK Airport. Apparently by accident, the two women meet at an airport bar, Claire heading to Puerto Rico and Eva returning to California to make a deal with the feds. The two agree to switch identities: They swap plane tickets as well as cell phones, keys, and even clothing items. When the plane to Puerto Rico crashes and Eva is presumed dead, Claire faces an enormous challenge. She arrives in Oakland and takes up residence in Eva’s apartment but has no idea who Eva actually is. Claire determines quickly that the story Eva told at the airport—that she was on the run from police for assisting her cancer-patient husband to die—was a lie.

As Claire struggles to figure out exactly who Eva was, the novel chronicles the months leading up to Eva’s decision to cooperate with the feds. Despite a difficult upbringing (her mother, who had a drug addiction, gave her up to the foster care system when Eva was only two), Eva was a gifted chemistry student at UC-Berkeley and dreamed of being a college professor. When she got involved with a big-time UC jock, Eva was enticed to work for a massive drug operation that serviced the campus community. She brought her expertise to cook the drugs and even helped sell them. When she and her boyfriend were busted using the campus chem lab, the boyfriend flipped on Eva and she was expelled. Without any alternative, she began to work for the syndicate while maintaining an alibi as a server at a campus restaurant.

When Eva barely avoids arrest in a federal sting operation, she knows it is time to get out. Her new boyfriend, Dex, discourages her; over the 10 years she has worked for the drug syndicate she has become a valuable asset. It is only when she makes friends with Liz, a neighbor in her apartment building who is a visiting professor from Princeton, that Eva realizes how much she wants her life back. When the FBI denies her request for relocation and she discovers that Dex is in fact the syndicate’s kingpin, she knows she is on her own. She decides to fly to New Jersey, hoping that Liz will help her. Liz’s advice, however, is to return to California and make a deal with the FBI; though risky, it is the only sure way to get her life back. The last night before she heads to JFK, Eva overhears Liz and her daughter, who works for the Cook Foundation, talk about Claire and her flight the next day; the daughter believes Claire might be planning to leave Rory. Eva hatches a new plan: find Claire at the airport and convince her to trade tickets. The plot works perfectly, and Eva boards the doomed plane certain that she is now free.

Meanwhile, Claire understands that she must move quickly. Although Rory plays the grieving widower for the cameras, his operatives have discovered the box she sent to the Detroit hotel. When NTSB investigators tell Rory that evidence shows Claire’s seat was empty at the time of the crash, a fuming Rory initiates a search for Claire. Claire monitors this from Berkeley by tapping into her husband’s Twitter and email accounts. Because she needs money, she takes a catering job recommended by Kelly, one of the baristas at a coffee shop Claire visits and a newfound friend. She tells Kelly her circumstances, and Kelly agrees to help Claire run north, maybe to Oregon. 

When it is clear to Claire that Rory’s minions are closing in, she makes a deal with the local CNN affiliate to share information she found on Rory’s computer that implicates him in the death of his first wife in a housefire. Claire understands the risks of going public, but sharing her story as an abused wife is the only way to get her life back. The plan works; Rory faces indictment for murder. Now free, Claire returns to Berkeley to start a new life.