End of Story (2024) by A. J. Finn

Today’s review is for a mystery from a new-to-me author who I decided to take a punt on, as the premise sounded like it had some interesting metafictional potential. Others reading this post may be familiar with this writer already as Finn previously published The Woman in the Window back in 2018.

Synopsis

‘“I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.”

This is the chilling invitation from Sebastian Trapp, renowned mystery novelist, to his long-time correspondent Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction. Welcomed into his lavish San Francisco mansion, Nicky begins to unravel Trapp’s life story under the watchful eyes of his enigmatic wife and plainspoken daughter. But Sebastian Trapp is a mystery himself. And maybe – probably – a murderer. Two decades ago, his first wife and son vanished, the case never solved. Is the master of mystery playing a deadly game? If so, who will be the loser? And when a body surfaces in the family’s garden, they all realize the past isn’t buried – it’s waiting.’

Overall Thoughts

I liked how the book starts with a brief foreshadowing scene in which a woman is found dead in pool. The narrative then jumps back in time to 6 days previously. I am not always a fan of books beginning with foreshadowing as they can become a bit generic, but the reason I liked this one was because it encourages the reader to pay attention to the story that follows, to look for clues for who the woman might be and who might be involved in her demise.

We first meet our protagonist Nicky Hunter, who is travelling in a taxi from the airport to Sebastian Trapp’s home in San Francisco. Perceiving that Nicky is from out of town, the driver shares the various mysteries associated with the area: a plane which crashes without no one in it, an uncaught serial killer and the disappearance of Sebastian’s wife (Hope) and son (Cole) on New Year’s Eve twenty years ago. Fittingly the weather is foggy, which heightens the disappearance theme: ‘When she turns around, the fog has closed in upon itself, iced over, smooth and still as a mirror, as though the cab and its driver had never been there at all.’

Whilst I found the extensive home architecture and décor descriptions excessive at times, there were some instances where descriptions were more creatively crafted and meaningfully used. For example, when Nicky first meets Sebastian, the revealing of this moment is conveyed with pleasing structural repetition, creating a layering effect:

‘And before the fireplace sits a desk – old, wooden.

And on the desk, a typewriter – old, metal.

And behind the typewriter, a man – old, but older than he looks, Nicky knows.’

Furthermore, descriptions were sometimes used as a vehicle for humour such as this one: ‘Why did she wink? Nicky feels as though as scanned a checkout item without wanting to. Or without meaning to, anyway.’

Nicky and Sebastian seem to have a promising start, as they are both able to drop Sherlock Holmes references into their conversation which the other person picks up on. Sebastian attempts to analyse Nicky’s handwriting, which mirrors the deductive flourishes Holmes would make, although in this case Sebastian gets it wrong which hand Nicky writes with.  Nicky is quite tongue tied to begin with and is introduced as a critic, but this is less easy to witness in the opening chapters where Nicky more occupies the role of “fan”. The reader seems far more suspicious of Sevastian than Nicky is. Reading this book made me realise that I struggle to warm to protagonists who are “fans”. An interesting comparison which occurred to me, when reading this story, is with the protagonist from Meg Shaffer’s The Wishing Game (2023), called Lucy, as I felt she managed to be a bit more sceptical of her “literary hero”. If I remember correctly, it seemed like Lucy was prepared to be more questioning than Nicky Hunter is in Finn’s novel. Conversely, Nicky seemed more sentimental, a quality which I can find off-putting in a character.

Parallels can be drawn between Sebastian Trapp and real-life detective story writers Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, as like them, Sebastian grew to dislike his series sleuth (who has acknowledged traits in common with Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey). However, to begin with I did wonder if Sebastian as a consequence, came across as bit of a pastiche of a mystery novelist character. Unlike the awed Nicky, my first impressions of Sebastian were that he was a rather thin character.

The disappearance of Hope and Cole has some interesting puzzle potential as they vanished from separate locations. However, eighty pages in, I didn’t feel like there was much mystification going on and I definitely wasn’t desperate to solve their disappearance. This is in contrast to Nicky who recalls some lines from Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868):

‘Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach? And a nasty thumping at the top of your head? I call it the detective-fever. It will lay hold of you.’

Alas not me though… Unfortunately, this becomes something of a refrain within the novel as a whole and for me it just didn’t work. It didn’t add momentum or tension, probably due to where the refrain was being used i.e. moments where nothing dramatic had happened.

Whilst the action of the story is mostly seen from the viewpoint of Nicky, at times A. J. Finn switches this perspective to Madeline, Sebastian’s daughter. I thought this was a good idea as it allows the reader to see Nicky from the Trapp family point of view as well as Madeline’s thoughts about her family and their troubled past.

Interest in the central disappearance increases a bit more once Madeline starts receiving messages from someone using Cole’s secret nickname. The same occurs when the reader learns more about Cole’s unhappy childhood, although I think this aspect of the plot could have worked just as well with a smaller page count devoted to discussing it, as it does become repetitive. If you’re expecting a mystery in which Nicky tries to figure out where people were on the night of Hope and Cole’s disappearance and where traditional detective methods are used to find out the truth, then you’re going to be disappointed. In general, I think the book needed to be much shorter as I think a tighter plot (where every scene counts) would have made the tension in this novel electrifying. As it is there was no real palpable sense of a cat and mouse game between Sebastian and Nicky, unlike a recent book I read, The Botanist (2020) by Anne Wedgwood, which deployed the cat and mouse trope more effectively. Repetition is a weakness of End of Story, in my opinion, as for example, once the narrative covers the six days prior to the woman being found in the pool, and the police naturally arrive to investigate, the questioning by the lead detective (whose informal language and sentence syntax I found annoying) covers information we already know and when Madeline and Nicky’s thoughts on the latest death are focused upon, both of them circle around and around the same ideas and theories. There is no development or change, which made the reading experience dull. As I made my way through the novel, I increasingly came to the conclusion that it neither meets the needs of a detective story (due to lack of clues/suppressed information) nor the needs of a thriller (due to a lack of tension and poor pacing). This is a shame as I thought the solution had a lot of strengths and if it had had the right setup/narrative runup, it would have had a great impact. Unfortunately, this setup was not in place, as the solution requires a very long explanation and is concealed from the reader due to every character hiding huge pieces of important information.

Rating: 3/5