End Of Story by A.J. Finn (2024) Nothing any blogger could say would prevent this book from becoming an instant best seller....
After all, it arrives from A.J.Finn, whose "The Woman In The Window" flew off the Barnes & Noble tables at the front of each store...
Everyone wants to know......any good? Will it keep me up all night? Is it as fun and readable as "Woman In The Window"?
SQ's reply......
It's a vastly more ambitious effort than "Window".....sometimes with wit so sharp, you could cut a knife with it. But in telling its long, involved story, sometimes a maddening, 1 mile-an-hour slow boat to who knows where......
At times, the prose will dazzle you with cleverness, even while you mutter, "Oh please, just cut to the chase and get on with it already, willya?"
Yes, it's that kind of book.
Welcome to the sprawling, sumptuous San Francisco mansion of world famous mystery writer Sebastian Trapp. A dying, elderly recluse, Trapp himself is surrounded with as much mystery as was ever in his whodunit adventures of a 1920's Holmes-ian detective.
Whatever happened to his first wife Hope and teenage son Cole, both of whom disappeared off the face of the earth simultaneously ....from two different locations? Kidnappings? Murders? Alien abductions?
Maybe Nicky Hunter, a young chronicler of detective fictions can figure it all out. Trapp's invited her to live in the mansion, supposedly to help him with his memoirs, but he teases her with the idea that "they might be able to solve a mystery or two themselves..."
Swirling around in Trapp's orbit are all manner of unusual suspects... including his beautiful second wife Diana, his dutiful daughter Madeline, imperious Aunt Simone and her son, cousin Fred, who was Cole's best friend before the boy dropped out of sight. Do some of them or all of them know more than they're letting on?
Little by little, Nicky's able to start snapping the Greek Tragedy family puzzle pieces together, particularly in the short heartbreaking life of Cole Trapp. Sensitive, gentle and brutally bullied, the boy earned nothing but withering contempt from his famous father, who's sort of a mashup of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Ernest Hemingway.
All the suspicious doings in Castle Trapp take a long, long time to unfold, but author Finn tries to entertain us with the book's knowing tributes to the tropes and lore of classic detective fiction. Like the board game "Clue" and the play "Sleuth", he loads up the plot with clues, weapons, red herrings, and mysterious notes from.....(SPOILER REDACTED SO YOU'LL CONTINUE READING THIS REVIEW....)
If you make it to the final chapters, "End Of Story" finally launches itself into a highly theatrical melodramatic windup......obviously thrown in to make the movie deal easier to secure. The revelations and Big Reveals require pages and pages of dialogue exposition to explain fully......but Finn does himself or the book no favors by dragging this out even further with overwritten, literary fiction flourishes.
Those who savor and adore detective fiction of days gone by will feast on "End Of Story", but anyone seeking out a potential easy, breezy beach read.........the draggy pace may very well put you in a deep enough snooze until you're wakened by the tide coming in....
3 stars (***). (Helpful hint: it's not Col.Mustard...in the library....with a candlestick.....)
No comments:
Post a Comment