'The Night Shift' was an entertaining, if somewhat uneven thriller. It's a plot-driven book, told from three points of view. Although the events in the Blockbuster video store on News Eve 1999 are the starting point for the mystery, the story is told mostly in the present-day timeline and is all the better for that.

Two of the three points of view the story is told from were personally affected by what happened in the Blockbuster store. One is the younger brother of the man accused of the crime. One was the sole survivor. The first is now a lawyer in the same town, the other is a trauma therapist. You can see how tightly wound those connections are. They get tighter as the plot unfolds. The third person is a very pregnant FBI agent who provides a much-needed outsider's perspective. She drives most of the disclosure and a lot of the action.

For me, the strength of the novel lay in its plot, which was more complex and had more links between the two timelines than I'd expected and how skilfully the lies, misunderstandings and the, often concealed, intricate connections between the players were disclosed. Except for the final resolution, there was surprisingly little tension in this thriller but it hooked my curiosity and pulled me through the novel until the exciting, surprising and very violent final disclosure.

So where does the unevenness come in? I found the writing at the start and especially in the almost fairytale-like epilogue, a little schmaltzy and sentimental. When the action kicked in, this went away, except when the FBI agent was in play. Maybe I'm just too cynical or too used to reading characters plagued by existential doubt but Agent Bad Ass as she was sometimes called, seemed unbelievably upbeat to me.

Schmatlz and exceptional good luck to one side, this was an engrossing, entertaining read with some well-timed surprises and a resolution that I wouldn't have guessed at but which made sense in retrospect.

I listened to the audiobook version of 'The Night Shift'. I liked that there was a narrator for each of the point of views. It meant I didn't have to spend any effort figuring out whose head I was in and it gave a voice to each character that made them easier to imagine.

Brittany Pressley as the lone survivor turned trauma therapist did her usual good job. I wasn't as comfortable with Cady McLain's rendition of the FBI agent. She came across as being from that school of narrators who feel that they should never read a word without some kind of emotion and shouldn't read too quickly for fear of losing people. This always grates on me and seems like a lack of trust in the text. She was very good at doing what she chose to do but I could have lived without half the effort that she put in.

Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear Brittany Pressley do her stuff.

https://soundcloud.com/macaudio-2/the-night-shift-by-alex-finlay-audiobook-excer... ( )

Didn't even finish. Narrator was annoying. Movie rental and ice cream parlor slaying. ( )

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press and Minotaur Books and the author for allowing me to read an advanced reader copy of this book. The book published on March 1, 2022.
The story starts out with Ella, Candy, Katie and Mandy as they are all closing up the Blockbuster on New Year’s Eve 1999 with their manager, Steve. Ella is the only survivor of a brutal attack that night. Fifteen years later, she receives a phone call from someone in her past asking her to go to the hospital to talk to another victim – this time Jesse is the only survivor of a very similar attack on a local business.
An arrest was made in the 1999 attack; but he was released on a technicality and virtually disappeared. Did he come back 15 years later and, if so, what is the connection between the two events? Told in multiple points of view, we have Ella, now a therapist and dealing with her own demons from the 1999 attack, FBI Agent Keller, who is pregnant with twins and teams up with Atticus to investigate, Chris, an attorney, who is connected to the attacker, and was adopted and given a new name.
I had figured out one aspect of the story relatively early and easily but wanted to see how it all played out. Overall, I thought it was well-written and will read his other books. The ending was dramatic…and the Epilogue could have been a bit more descriptive. ( )

A decent enough binge-read of an FBI thriller that’s got some eye-rolling convoluted plot points but it’ll tide you over until you can get a better mystery in your hands. The whole thing read like one very drawn out episode of “Criminal Minds” or a wannabe Riley Sager novel, just with less fleshed-out characters. Also, it does the whole James Patterson thing where the chapters are all very short (sometimes only 2 pages) and each one lands on a punchy kind of line or fact being dropped, which is just a deeply lazy way of writing imho.
Still, I kept flipping page after page of those short little chapters to find out what happened, so it was at least entertaining enough to see through to the end! ( )

3.5 ( )