In The Last Laugh (Katherine Tegen Books, 2022), Mindy McGinnis answers the questions left open at the end of The Initial Insult and reveals a different — and often negative — side of the characters who appeared in the first book of her duology.

Three storylines form the core of The Last Laugh. First is the effort to find Felicity Turnado, who Tress Montor trapped in the basement of the old Allan house and probably died when that house was demolished by order of the Amontillado City Council. Second, is Tress’s continuing effort to discover what happened to her parents seven years earlier when they disappeared without a trace while driving Felicity home. Third is the preparation for Amontillado High School’s homecoming, an event in which Tress’s cousin Ribbit Usher is playing a leading role.

These storylines sometimes run parallel to each other and sometimes intersect, and each has its own complications. Tress, for example, has to deal with an arm injured by an escaped panther and which has become dangerously infected. For his part, Ribbit must work with some of the same people who humiliated him at a final party held in the Allan house the previous Friday. People he may or may not have forgiven.

It is hard to say too much more about the plot without spoilers. Let’s just say that some characters are better off than others when the story ends. Speaking of characters, McGinnis brings in a few new ones. Those include Hugh Broward’s confused and angry grandmother, a private investigator named Ada LaLage, and Rue, the orangutan from Amontillado Animal Attractions. Rue appeared in The Initial Insult but in the sequel, she has her own voice and her own unique way of responding to “Foundchild,” “Manthing,” and other people.

In The Last Laugh, McGinnis uses the same type of terse gritty sentences that she used so effectively in The Initial Insult. These sentences allow the author to walk a tightrope when describing how her characters feel about and respond to what is happening. Consider this passage where Ribbit Usher reflects on the humiliating game — “Make a Fool of Kermit Usher” — he experienced at the Allan House party. “It’s an old game. It’s a good game. It’s a game I know how to win. Because life isn’t fair, and you can’t make people like you. But you can get revenge.”

Here, McGinnis walks a tightrope, taking the reader from Ribbit the docile fool of the first book to Ribbit the conniving avenger in the second. The same tightrope transition can be seen in this passage where Tress comes to see what she did to Felicity in a different light than she did in The Initial Insult.

“It’s my pain, my grief, my guilt. Something that will never leave me. I can fight it and push and yell and stick my chin out and deny, deny, deny. But inside, the truth crouches, dark and restless. And it will never let me forget that I killed Felicity.”

This remorseful Tress is much different than the cold-hearted one readers encountered in the first book.

Just about everything in The Last Laugh — the characters, the setting, the plot — seems credible with one exception. McGinnis describes Amontillado as having just one traffic light, but the town’s high school seems much too big for a town that small. There are all kinds of clubs at this school, which occupies a large building. Moreover, there is a multi-float homecoming parade that travels through local neighborhoods before the football game. All of this suggests the students come from a town that has far more than one traffic light.

In a future post, I will be reviewing McGinnis’s The Female of the Species. As part of this review, I’ll offer my opinion on why her books have achieved success in the YA market.