End of Story
By AJ Finn
(HarperCollins, $36.99)
This is the second thriller from AJ Finn; his first, Woman in the Window, was a bestseller. His backstory was a bestseller – until his stories about his brain cancer and his family’s fate turned out to be mostly bullshit. Well, he is a fiction writer. Finn, whose real name is Dan Mallory, is also, as I found, a hugely engaging interviewee.
Maybe his publishers are banking on his notoriety: that he’s better known as a major-league fibber than for his writing might not matter. But this is a completely unbelievable, if initially engaging, tale of a famous crime writer, Sebastian Trott, who lives in a vast San Francisco house in isolation with his strange daughter. His wife and a boy child have mysteriously disappeared. He is the chief suspect. But there are no bodies and no clues. He remarries: to his vanished wife’s former personal assistant. After a diagnosis of cancer and that he has three months to live, he invites (perhaps this is a roman à clef) a young journalist to live in his missing son’s old room. He wants a book written which will “tell his story”. The journalist might come to regret accepting his invitation. There is another death. It does rather go on, and on. This is a story as convoluted as the real AJ Finn story turned out to be. And the denouement is as absurd and nonsensical.
The Fury
By Alex Michaelides
(Michael Joseph, $37)
The murder in The Fury comes almost at the very end. But the major characters spend much of the narrative wanting to kill each other. And long before that end, you will want them to kill each other.
They are a group of desperate posers, druggies and dipsos, egomaniacs and creeps. This is the classic whodunnit: stick a bunch of horribles in a room together – the room here being a luxury island in Greece – and see what happens.
What happens is that the Fury arrives – a terrible wind that whips up trouble and portents on the little island. They are all stuck in a house, one that has been gifted to retired actor Lana by her much older and little-lamented husband, the filthy rich Otto. Now she is married to Jason. He’s broke, has a foul temper and is a total cad.
The utterly vile Elliot is Lana’s best friend. Her second-best friend is Kate, a theatrical actress who drinks, hysterically. Here they are: best friends together on an idyllic island, happily holidaying.
This is a bit amusing. But ultimately daft. The best you can say about it is that it is a brave move to make all of your characters ghastly enough to deserve being knocked off.
What Happened to Nina?
By Dervla McTiernan
(HarperCollins, $37.99)
Nina is in love with Simon. Simon is in love with Nina. They are childhood sweethearts from opposite sides of the track. He is rich, entitled, spoilt and striving to be popular. She is a middle-class sweetheart, a smart and nice person who effortlessly achieves popularity.
Their mothers despise each other. Nina’s mother, Leanne, thinks, rightly, that Simon’s mother, Jamie, is a Prada-wearing, self-obsessed cow. It will be mother versus mother once Nina goes missing. Jamie thinks that Leanne is prissy, boring, takes the higher moral ground. Her major crime, though, is she doesn’t care what she looks like. Jamie doesn’t bother with higher moral grounds. She’s too busy getting nips and tucks and buying madly expensive clobber in desperate attempts to stop her husband trading her in for a younger model.
It turns out that Simon is abusive. What happened to Nina at the cabin in Vermont is not a whodunnit. Yes, of course Simon killed her. It’s a matter of which mother is more ruthless at uncovering, or covering up, the crime. It’s pretty predictable, but also a pretty good read.
