Endless Night has to be the most unusual book I have read by Agatha Christie so far. I expected a murder mystery and what I got was a psychological thriller, a really great one at that.
It´s a slow burn of a novel. Christie takes an awful long time to set up her story and the plot thickens late in the book. Which has given her enough time to genuinly mess with my head. I didn´t expect this book to be that dark and twisted.
It is the best thing to know as little as possible about the book before reading it, so I will put the rest of my review behind spoiler tags:
Yeah, the main character is an unreliable narrator, I was right about that. And I do like unreliable narrators. Mike struck me from the very beginning as an odd and not very trustworthy character. And yet, towards the end of the book I got the impression that he genuinly loved Ellie and Christie through me off the loop. And then Mike tells us casually, in the same tone in which he would order a breakfast, that he is behind the killing and Greta is his accomplice (I didn´t see that coming).
But Mike isn´t the only suspicious character. Basically all of Ellie´s family is fishy to say the least. And the way the story is set up made me wonder if Ellie´s family had an agenda of their own. Uncle Andrew clearly knows that Mike and Greta know each other and yet he doesn´t actively try to find out what these two are up to (the staff might be spies of Andrews, butthey might just be ordinary people and Mike and Ellie were imaging things). I think that the whole family kind of knew what Mike and Greta were up to and they got along with it. Killing Ellie and the family knows about it is a good basis for blackmail, isn´t it? The perfect means to get their hands on Ellies fortune.
I have to reread this book at some point. Knowing how it ends I´m pretty sure I will be able to pick up on another things along the way.
(show spoiler)
I´ve read this for "In the Dark, Dark Woods" square of the halloween bingo. A lot of the story takes place in the woods, so it fits for that square.
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