Last Stone (Bowden) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE LAST STONE … then take off on your own:

1. Start off your discussion, say, by tracing the path that prompted detectives to reopen the Lyon sisters' case nearly 40 years after their disappearance.

2. In 1975 when Lloyd Welch failed the lie detector test, why did the police dismiss him? Was their dismissal understandable at the time (because Welch was such a good liar)? Or was it careless police work?

3. How would you describe Lloyd Welch?

4. During the interrogations, Welch revealed information about his family. How would you describe the family and its impact on Welch—and, more important, how were they involved in the case?

5. How would you describe the detectives' interrogation strategy? Consider their use of deceit and trickery, good-cop-bad-cop role playing, last minute second guessing, and on-the-spot gut decisions. Talk about Dave Davis, for instance, who uses empathy as a tactic, as does Katie Leggett.

6. Follow-up to Question 5: Bowden writes of the interrogation process: "you descend, by necessity, a moral ladder onto slippery ground." Talk about the emotional toll the questioning took on the detectives: their self-doubt, soul-searching, and fears of being morally compromised.

7. According to Bowden, the detectives worried that Welch might be playing to their own biases. Were they "zeroing in on the truth, or was Lloyd just desperately inventing?" How did Welch evade the questioning? How did he toy with the detectives? Do you think he had a strategy? Or was he simply a gifted liar, playing it "by the seat of his pants"? Why, in the first place, does Welch even want to talk with the detectives? Why does he give them any information at all?

8. What do you think about the book's ending?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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