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'"Nobody shall drive us away," I said. "We're going to be happy here." We said it like a challenge to fate.' - Endless Night, Ch. 13
The Sum of It:
Our narrator, Mike Rogers, really wants the reader to know him. He tells us all about himself, his success with the ladies, his nomadic lifestyle, all the different jobs he had, the sense he's got of being on the verge of something interesting: then he sees a real estate listing. A house called The Towers is up for auction, and out of curiosity he walks up the wooded road to see it. Immediately he knows he just has to live there. The views and the trees and the rolling hills are perfect, and his old friend, an architect, has already designed a house for him to build someday. Alas, Mike is broke, so he's not sure how his dreams will ever come true. While he's wandering through the trees, he stumbles across a beautiful American girl, who also climbed the hill to Gypsy's Acre (that's what the land is known as locally) curious about the real estate listing.
Mike and the girl, who turns out to be a crazy wealth heiress named Ellie, fall promptly in love. She is about to come of age, and is eager to escape her little bubble of other wealthy people and elderly advisors watching her every move. She and Mike elope, surprising everyone, and she surprises Mike by purchasing Gypsy's Acre, and they sign up his ailing architect friend, Rudy Santonix, to design it before he drops dead of consumption. Once the house is built, Mike and Ellie move in and are so excited and happy, except they keep getting harassed and warned off by this old creepy Gypsy lady, who is rumored to be mad that her people got kicked off the land ages ago. Eventually Ellie invites her former secretary, Greta, to come stay. Ellie and Greta are BFF, and Mike is more than a little jealous, eventually even getting into a shouting match with the glamorous Greta. Soon enough, a fatal accident befalls one of the party, and everything is thrown into tumult. That accident is closely followed by the disappearance of the old Gypsy lady, Miss Lee, and the death of a friend from the neighborhood, Claudia Hardcastle. People start to think something fishy is going on and THAT'S when it really gets good.
The YOA Treatment:
OOOOOH I have been waiting ALL YEAR to see if this book was as good as the absolutely PERFECT version from television. And guess what...IT WAS. Boy is it creepy and clever, Broadchurch-style. I seriously recommend this one if you're in the market for a good mystery to read while it's cold and gray outside this winter.
For one thing, I've found as we've moved through this year that I really enjoy the books where we get our narration in first person. There's an added element of mystery in wondering if we can trust our narrator, or if they're missing something, or if we're missing something about them. The narrator of Endless Night, Mike Rogers, eagerly pours himself out into the pages of the book. He's telling the story but he's regularly trying to get the reader to understand something about himself, how he became who he is, the experiences and circumstances that shaped him, his own hopes and dreams. Agatha does an amazing job of getting inside his head and making us feel like we know him. At one point he tells us:
"I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something."
There is also a nice creepy sense of foreboding in this book, you can't quite figure out what's going to go wrong, but you know something will. As Mike falls in love with a piece of land, Gypsy's Acre, and with the girl he meets under the trees there, things seem to be going great, but then creepy stuff happens: a weird prediction from an elderly Gypsy lady on the road, a brick through a window, a warning look in someone's eyes. Once a terrible thing finally happens, we still aren't quite sure what's happening, even who might be the culprit. By the time you reach the end of this book, the revelation of the actual criminal (if it's a new story to the reader) is pretty impressively shocking, right up there with Crooked House. Though this is one of Agatha's last few books (boohoo!), it feels like a super strong return to form to me.
-E.
