It’s New Year’s Eve of 1999 when four teenagers working late are attacked at a Blockbuster video store in New Jersey. Only one inexplicably survives. Police quickly identify a suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, who flees and is never seen again.
Fifteen years later, four more teenagers are attacked at an ice cream store in the same town, and again only one makes it out alive.
In the aftermath of the latest crime, three lives intersect: the lone survivor of the Blockbuster massacre, who is forced to relive the horrors of her tragedy; the brother of the fugitive accused, who is convinced the police have the wrong suspect and FBI agent Sarah Keller, who must delve into the secrets of both nights to uncover the truth about the night-shift murders.

‘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.