The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The blurb from one reviewer said “…like no crime novel I’ve ever read.” That’s true, but that’s not actually praise. A lot of us are fans of conventional crime novels. If you are, you’re likely to be disappointed in this one, as I was. It’s set in England. The main characters are a male physicist, a brilliant child, a woman police detective and a scientist couple. The woman has recently been expelled from the force, but we don’t know the details of why. The woman scientist dies and the now ex-detective suspects she was murdered, even though she had cancer and died in a hospital. Then that woman’s body goes missing. Okay, that’s a pretty good setup. I was interested for the first 60% of the book. But at that point, the deaths (there are more) are explained and the culprit convicted. The case is solved.
Suddenly there is a white page with nothing but “Part 2” in the center. Everything we thought we knew starts to come into doubt. It becomes weirder and departs from the mundane. The characters are scientists, remember. And this is a novel, i.e. fiction. Science and fiction. Enough said. I found the ending imaginative, but unsatisfying. Still, it kept me reading and was entertaining enough to merit three stars.