The Last Thing You See
Cover image by Tina Hays.
What if the worst moment of your life were seen by the entire world?
A lonely police officer trying to reconnect with his high school love; a gamer juggling a mysterious illness and a recovering-addict father; a teen mom doing webcam sex shows to pay the bills: three people from a trio of Southern California communities, separated by race, class, gender, and circumstance. What connects them are the secrets they keep hidden, certain that if people knew, no one would ever love them for who they try to be.
After a violent public incident, they're pitted against one another, harassed and threatened by an online mob that demands retribution. As secrets are exposed, they're forced to make shocking decisions to protect what matters most to them. Not everyone will make it out alive.
The Last Thing You See is a powerful novel about shame, justice, and the difference between the person you feel inside and who everyone else chooses to see.
What the fuck was he doing? Why were those other people just standing there, letting a grown man talk to her daughter? He probably had a very clever explanation, a surefire reason why it was her fault for misunderstanding. She ran.
Characters
David Flores: After years of hard work, David has finally been able to take care of his ailing mother, pay her hospital bills, and move her to a better neighborhood in middle-class Valley Ridge. He works as a police officer in working-class Rancho Arena, where he grew up, but the job isn’t something he’s proud of; in fact, it’s the one job he always told himself he would never perform. David has a lot of dark memories, but he believes he’s made himself good enough for Angie, the girl he’s loved since high school. Though finally ready to try again, he fears something from his past may come back to ruin it all.
Keri London: When Keri got pregnant at 16, she thought her religious community would be supportive of her choice to have the child. What she found instead was judgment and rejection. Now 19 and living on her own with a two-year-old, she works at a drug store and does online cam shows to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Valley Ridge. Lily, her daughter, is her entire world, but raising her alone at such a young age means constantly having to defend herself from threats both real and imagined, and living under the whole world’s scrutiny means one mistake could cost her everything.
Alex Melton: Growing up biracial in upper-class Olive Glen meant Alex was different her whole life, and it isn’t any easier now: she lives at home with her unemployed father and struggles with a mysterious, embarrassing bowel disorder that makes normal activities nearly impossible. Alex finds community through Dungeon Glory, an online game where she’s become a celebrity among a small group of friends she’s never met. Alex’s shame and insecurity make her terrified to be seen, but when she witnesses something she can’t ignore, she has to decide whether it’s time to step forward and face what she’s never wanted anyone to know.
Mateo Zamora: Angie’s ex Mateo has been incarcerated for the past several years, and has been humbled by the experience. David doesn’t trust Mateo and doesn’t want Angie to let him back into her life. Mateo is desperate to make things right with Angie and their daughter, Adelita, and neither he nor David know what Angie is really thinking. Upon his release, he encounters the harsh realities of trying to reenter a society that isn’t concerned with redemption.
Patrick Melton: A former college professor, Patrick became addicted to painkillers and spent the better part of a decade in and out of rehabs, prisons, and halfway houses. Now living with Alex, he wants to regain the respect of those around him, especially his daughter, but has to hide the fact that his mind doesn’t work the way it used to. For Patrick, the future feels meaningless without the wife he lost without ever getting the chance to show her he could be the man she thought he was.
Gordie Childs: Patrick’s former drug dealer and only friend, Gordie has had plenty of time to reflect on his own incarceration and how it feels to be branded a criminal. He has very different ideas from Patrick and Mateo about what he deserves, how much he’s been punished, and what he’ll do in order to feel like a man again.
Inhabiting three SoCal suburbs with different economic and racial demographics, these people live their lives in parallel, encountering many of the same situations and issues, but with different experiences guiding them. When their stories collide, the novel shows us how these events are seen through different characters’ eyes and how it feels to go through something of such magnitude without anyone who understands your point of view.
Through a range of perspectives and styles, we see how a single event reverberates and affects everyone it touches across entire communities, confronting contemporary topics like policing, drug addiction, domestic abuse, prisons, sexual assault, teen pregnancy, guns, online harassment, chronic illness, and so much more. This is a novel for anyone who’s ever felt something they couldn’t explain, ever kept quiet because they feared no one would understand, ever begged to become someone new.
I’m confident everyone who reads this book will experience it differently, that it will spark conversations about tough subjects, and that it’s a story people won’t soon forget.
If they found out, if it came down to an autopsy of her character, no one would be on her side. That’s why she’d always known she had to keep it inside forever. She’d imagined what would happen so many times, lived out the shame in her mind over and over. There was no version where it went well.
So, this is another book for kids?
No. No, it is not. I’m sure you probably found out about me from the Troublemakers series, but this book is very different. It’s not funny at all.
But Gregg, none of your books are funny at all. You suck.
Yeah, I know, but this one doesn’t even try to be funny. It’s a serious novel that deals with difficult themes. And it’s very much for adults. The novel contains explicit discussions of sexual abuse, violence, suicide, and other grown-up issues. I would say anyone who’s not yet in high school is too young to read it without guidance from an adult.
They didn’t know fear like he did; they’d only experienced it while emboldened by authority and a firearm; he’d lived it when he was most vulnerable, and in a just world, he’d get the same amount of credit for surviving that as an officer wounded in the line of duty got. David was never afraid when things were happening, only when they weren’t, that period of empty dread when he knew it was only a matter of time before everything became terrible again.
Are you done with Troublemakers, then?
Hopefully not. I’d love to write more Troublemakers books AND more books for adults, alternating the two as long as I can. But the reality is that Troublemakers earns money and my adult fiction never has. I spent five and a half years on The Last Thing You See. I think it’s a commercial novel with wide appeal, but it’s also deeply personal to me and I poured everything I had into it. I can’t do better than this, so if I can’t find a way to break through with this one, I probably won’t write another adult novel.
I plan to work on another Troublemakers book in 2026, but let’s be honest: if I were smart, I wouldn’t have neglected the series for an ambitious project like The Last Thing You See right when Troublemakers was becoming popular. I’m taking a major gamble here. This book is not what my readers are expecting from me, and it might destroy my brand, wrecking my Troublemakers readership as well. I don’t know. I decided to take a big swing, and I’m sticking with it because I believe this book is something special.
What I’m saying is this: I need your help. This book does not have the benefit of a major publisher with a PR budget. The only way people will find out about it is from those who have read it. If you’re willing to give it a try, I think you’ll get something out of it. If that’s the case, then please write a review online, post about it on social media, recommend it to a book club, tell your friends. Your little Instagram post could be the difference between success and failure for this novel, and could give me the chance to write more like it. Thank you thank you thank you to everyone willing to try reading a serious novel from the guy who writes those books about middle school kids with diarrhea. I appreciate you.
Don’t complain, so you don’t have to go back to your old life. But part of him thinks he is only pretending. Maybe there is no changing. Maybe he has been left on Earth by mistake, and his life is already over. Maybe he isn’t as sorry as he wants to be.
Are you in a book club?
I saw some other author online offering to Zoom in to book clubs to do Q&A’s for free. Is that something people would want? I don’t know, but if you’re interested, I’ll do it. I will gladly listen to and hopefully answer whatever questions you and your clubmates want to ask in exchange for getting the book read. Contact me via As Seen in Japan if you’re interested.
HEY BITCH,
SAW YOU TODAY WITH YOUR LITTLE SWEETHEART.
YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.
WE WARNED YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU SHOWED YOUR FACE IN THIS TOWN AGAIN.
NOW YOUR GONNA GET WHAT YOU DESERVE.
PREPARE TO BE HUNTED.
MAYBE WE’LL YANK OUT YOUR TEETH ONE BY ONE.
OR RAPE YOUR ASS WITH A HUNTING KNIFE.
OR STAB OUT YOUR EYES AND FUCK THE HOLES.
YOU SCARED?
YOU BETTER BE.
YOU DON’T KNOW THE TRUE MEANING OF FEAR, BUT YOU WILL.
BY THE TIME YOU SCREAM, IT’LL BE TOO LATE.
THE LAST THING YOU SEE IS GONNA BE THE BARREL OF MY AR-15.