5-STAR REVIEW: THE LAST LAP by Christy Hayes

Publication Date: February 5, 2023

Megan Holloway has learned a few hard truths in her twenty-eight-years. Life isn’t fair. People she loves always leave. And she’ll be stuck on Key West running her parents’ gift store and raising her twelve-year-old niece for the rest of her life.

Thirty-year-old Bryan Westfall has come to Key West to clean out his dead brother’s apartment and search for answers about the woman who died with his estranged older brother. Bryan didn’t know the woman had a daughter and he sure didn’t expect her sister to floor him with her beauty and biting brashness.

Bryan’s persistent need to help and Meg’s bumbling business skills create an unlikely union. The more time they spend together, the more their feelings become too powerful to deny. Meg knows Bryan is leaving at the end of the summer and Bryan knows Meg is holding back to spare herself needless heartache. When a hurricane forces them to evacuate, Meg mentally prepares to let Bryan go while Bryan wonders if home is where he came from or is with the woman who stole his heart.

Bryan Westfall has lost an estranged brother. Meg Holloway has lost a sister who was dearer to her than life itself. The two died together, leaving questions, pain, and grief in their wake. 

When Bryan Westfall comes to Key West to finalize his brother’s affairs and search for answers, he discovers more than he bargained for in Meg Holloway and her niece, Lily. In The Last Lap, Christy Hayes brings these characters and their struggles vividly alive, transporting the reader effortlessly into their world. 

Even though Bryan Westfall has lost touch with his wayward older brother, he still mourns his loss. To save his parents from the ordeal, Bryan resolutely heads to Key West and starts the task of cleaning out his brother’s apartment. 

Meg Holloway has taken on full ownership of A Day’s Wait, the gift shop she and her sister owned and operated in Key West. Feeling overwhelmed, Meg deals not only with the responsibility of the store’s operation but also raising her sister’s daughter, Lily, an 11-year-old dealing with the sudden loss of her mother. 

In pursuit of answers to his brother’s last days and perhaps a reason for his death, Bryan approaches Meg, whose fierce resistance to him is evidence of the depth of loss she feels. 

Over time and with the help of Bryan and Meg’s friends, the magnetic attraction both felt from their first encounter is given a chance to deepen and grow. Their underlying grief and the starkly different worlds from which they come serve as serious deterrents to what might be the very thing they both secretly long to find. 

Through inward and outward struggles and the ominous threat of an approaching hurricane, will Bryan and Meg be able to rise above their grief and circumstances to realize the future they might realize together and as a family with Lily?

The Last Lap is a search for belonging and happiness by two individuals who have suffered great loss. Christy Hays does a masterful job of creating Bryan and Meg’s day-to-day life on Key West, making us care about them and their island family and friends who help them survive themselves. 

The Last Lap is an absorbing read that plunges the reader into the steamy world of Key West and into the lives of Bryan and Meg, thereby creating our own desire for them to successfully find themselves and each other.  

Christy Hayes is a USA Today Bestselling author. She grew up along the southeastern seaboard and received two degrees from the University of Georgia. An avid reader, she writes romance and women’s fiction. Christy and her husband have two grown children and live with a houseful of dogs in the foothills of north Georgia.