It Ends at Midnight is a thriller written by Harriet Tyce following the journey of a solicitor (training to be judge) as she is forced to revisit secrets from her past.
The book is written in two different timelines. One being where we are catching glimpses into someone’s death. The perspectives of this are different (there’s a fox’s viewpoint as well as a dog walker and the victim themselves). The rest of the book is written in first person through the eyes of Sylvia.
There are two main parts to the story, all leading up to the incident at midnight. First, we follow Sylvia as she takes part as a judge in junior court. She suspects one of the teenagers to be lying to protect their friend. This draws a parallel with the other main part of the story. Sylvia’s friend announces that she has cancer and wishes to make amends to a girl they blamed for hurting someone and subsequently got sent to prison. The friend then pushes Sylvia to track down this girl and apologise for everything that happened.
As Sylvia is trying to get in touch with this girl, she is accused of sexually harassing one of the defendants of the junior trial. There are images leaked, so she is under complete investigation, her friends turn against her, she loses her job, etc. This is when things start to spiral more as we approach the New Year’s Eve party.
This was a very slow-burn thriller. Personally, I didn’t like the random perspectives like the fox. I can see why it’d be an interesting writing angle but it doesn’t add to the story and since it’s so early on, it doesn’t add any tension as we don’t even know the character’s. The only connection was a police report where we hear about the dog walker to round off the story. Either way, it just didn’t add much to the story.
What was interesting was the ‘he said, she said’ element. Sylvia thinks her friend is out to get her as well as jealous and at the end of the book, it’s presented that the friend always found Sylvia to be jealous. It’s interesting to see the way the characters interact with Sylvia once she is accused. It’s a very realistic element. Of course we would all want to believe our friend, but as the saying goes, “mud sticks”. It’s hard to look past such heavy accusations and not have a slight reservation.
There were a few flashback scenes of Sylvia in her youth and to be honest, those scenes were really disappointing. They presented a very toxic school culture and made Sylvia and her friend incredibly dislikeable. It was necessary to have these scenes in order to put everything together, but it was a miserable read; not thrilling.
The disappointment comes with the main reveal of who was killed and how everything happened. The plot twist was quite predictable. Unless the characters had a substantial impact on the plot, they weren’t given much description or involvement in the story. So when a side character is heavily involved, you start to get suspicious but it’s also not entirely thrilling. It was nice to get complete clarification by the end of the book though.
My Rating - 5/10