Book review: End of Story by AJ Finn

End of Story by AJ Finn is the second by the American author (Daniel Mallory) whose first book, The Woman in the Window (published in 2018) was widely praised. However Finn / Mallory also drew attention, not all of which was positive. The question of course then is whether Finn falls into the second-book trap – the struggle to match the stellar debut. And given this novel hasn’t received the same attention as his debut, it could be said that it hasn’t lived up to the hype of his first, however this is a really good and quite addictive read so it’s probably a case of unbelievably high expectations or, potentially, some continued disquiet following the launch of his first book. Very weirdly I’ve not read his debut (I thought I had) though I’ve heard him speak at a Writers’ Festival and can see some of Finn/Mallory’s quirkiness in his prose and dialogue in particular.

“I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.”
So writes Sebastian Trapp, reclusive mystery novelist, to his longtime correspondent Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction. With mere months to live, Trapp invites Nicky to his spectacular San Francisco mansion to help draft his life story . . . living alongside his beautiful second wife, Diana; his wayward nephew, Freddy; and his protective daughter, Madeleine. Soon Nicky finds herself caught in an irresistible case of real-life “detective fever.”

“You and I might even solve an old mystery or two.”
Twenty years earlier—on New Year’s Eve 1999—Sebastian’s first wife and teenaged son vanished from different locations, never to be seen again. Did the perfect crime writer commit the perfect crime? And why has he emerged from seclusion, two decades later, to allow a stranger to dig into his past?

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”
As Nicky attempts to weave together the strands of Sebastian’s life, she becomes obsessed with discovering the truth . . . while Madeleine begins to question what her beloved father might actually know about that long-ago night. And when a corpse appears in the family’s koi pond, both women are shocked to find that the past isn’t gone—it’s just waiting.

I very much liked our main narrator Nicky though we’re not given a lot of backstory. Having said that she’s a complex and multidimensional character, but the fact she doesn’t talk about her family or her past made me wonder what secrets might be lurking there. Diana, Sebastian’s (second) wife is our other narrator and a couple of times I wasn’t sure whose head I was in, so I’m not sure the point-of-view was always clear. Perhaps if one had been first person it might have been easier. (I’m not sure… *shrugs*).

Finn throws in some obvious red herrings here and though some feel SO obvious you’re unsure if it’s a double-blind (#orsomething) and we’re meant to be lulled into a sense of smug (but misguided) superiority. I liked that Finn doesn’t mess about NOT having Sebastian address the elephant in the room – the disappearance of his first wife and son (Cole) two decades earlier. Nicky goes into the gig of writing his memoir / documenting his memories unsure if he will want to talk about that time of his life, but he dives straight in.

This book really hits its straps as it nears the end. Finn does a great job in slowly eking out secrets and huge plot twists that I certainly didn’t see coming. Interestingly, one of those would have been less feasible had one of the key players not been aware of it (and I can’t say more or it’d be a spoiler). I appreciated that Finn also delves deeper here, considering family legacies and relationships – particularly those between fathers and sons. Old diary entries reference confrontations between Sebastian and Cole who believed he was a disappointment to his father. When Nicky asks Sebastian if he hated Cole (which the diaries would indicate) he responds with reference to a recurring nightmare he had with wolves attacking his own father (who had suicided when he was a child)…

You’ll learn that the rumours are true: you’re only as happy as your least happy child. I couldn’t survive our unhappy child; he would doom me. I needed for him to change. For his sake, certainly, but for mine as well. Otherwise the wolves would drag me into the woods and strip me to the bone. And what if they began hunting Cole? How could I defend him while my carcass rotted on the forrest floor? p 309

I enjoyed the character development here and the duality of both Sebastian and his daughter Madeleine in particular. I also appreciated the continued reference to golden-age crime fiction with Sebastian tending to insert author or character quotes into conversations. In some ways this is a bit of a love story to books of that era (reminding me of Benjamin Stevenson’s Ernest Cunningham series). There’s also some interesting commentary from Sebastian on mystery novels versus psychological thrillers…. stories without heroes and sometimes without villains, here warning Nicky she’s a participant in the latter.