Joy Ellis

The Night Thief

Katharina Hoffmann

- 2.5 stars -
PSA: my rating has nothing to do with Richard’s narration of the audiobook. He did a perfect job (as always) and he’s once again masterfully managed all different kinds of dialects (Welsh, Scottish, posh British English) and seems to effortlessly manage to give each character a distinct voice. I could listen to him narrating a random person's grocery list.

However, even He could not save this snooze fest of a book. The premised promised an exciting couple of hours well spent listening to Richard’s voice but while the latter proved to be true, the former did not.

The Night Thief is the eighth instalment in Ellis’ Jackman and Evans series and given that I hadn’t read the previous books, it made it very hard to connect to the characters and their struggles. The friendship between the two officers Evans and Jackman was already very well established. There were a lot of references to past lovers, cases, and happenstances that did not make sense to me. In this book, there are assembled a lot of characters, not only on the police force, but a lot of victims, witnesses and side characters and it was very hard keeping up with them, especially with those that were already established in previous books and thus weren’t introduced to the reader.

I always love a good murder mystery but with this one, the action didn’t really kick off until 60% into the book. I was quite bored, constantly waiting for something exciting or creepy to happen. I never DNF books and I didn’t DNF this one, but I know that many people do stop reading if the hook never seems to come and I get why some readers didn’t finish this book. 

Apart from the fact that this read like a wild goose chase (they interview person A who says person B might know more who says they saw person C doing something fishy who says “it wasn’t me but person D could help you”), I was a bit bewildered by the fact that Jackman was so obsessed with Marie Evans, subordinate, and constantly worried about her even though he’s her boss and they both had a partner.

All in all, I might have liked this book better if I had read the previous instalments because then I would have known more about the characters and would have been able to follow their storylines better. However, even that wouldn’t have made this book significantly better. It’s too sluggish for that, too full with side characters, and quite frankly, boring.

Juliana Matias

The Night Thief is a procedural crime book, which will be out on November 18th, and I got a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here we go.

This book has an exciting starting point. In a cluster of small little English towns, a man is breaking into women's houses in the middle of the night and scaring the hell out of them, but all he takes from their houses is a picture of a 10-year-old boy before leaving through the front door. And let me tell you, as a woman living alone, the thought of a creep breaking into my house and watching me sleep is terrifying.

So I thought I was going to enjoy this book. I was expecting to be kept in a simmering level of anxiety throughout the book - as it turns out, not so much. Also, it turns out that going into a book with incorrect expectations hinders my enjoyment of a book.

Let me make one thing clear: this book is not a thriller. I almost want to call it a cosy mystery, but it didn't feel very cosy to me despite the small-town setting. Also, while a mystery was somewhat driving the plot forward, there was no sense of urgency, and it's not at the heart of the story. I want to say this story is character-driven, but there are so many characters, and none of them is presented in much depth, nor does any of them undergo an actual character arc, so I'm a bit at a loss. It's almost a slice of life narrative in the lives of the police department of Saltern-le-Fern.

If you go prepared for that, I guess this is a perfectly adequate book. I also found out after I finished the book that it's the 8th in a series, so I think it would help if you'd read those before as it feels there are so many characters because they probably all already had their arcs in previous books. You'd probably care about most of the scenes if you cared about the characters, but I guess I'm not the target audience after all.

Here are some things that bugged me without giving too much away. 

1. There were too many characters, and it feels like all of them are cops (I can think of 8 off the top of my head), and I couldn't tell them apart for most of the book.

2. Because we are following so many characters, the narrative is meandering at best, making it hard to keep up any momentum or tension in the story.

3. There is a secondary plotline that is clearly set up to be a red herring, and although the author did try to tie things together, it still felt disconnected to me at the end. 

4. I don't quite know how to put this, but everyone was strangely polite in this book in a way that felt unrealistic. It felt a little like the tea-with-my-grandmother version of a crime novel: too sanitised, for lack of a better word.

5. There is a lot of telling instead of showing at the end of the book. It ends with an epilogue-style last chapter where the characters are having dinner together and explaining what happened because we didn't get enough information to fill in the gaps throughout the book.

But I guess that's the point because this book is not about the mystery, the victims, or even the crime itself. It's about the lives of these cops, but I think if that was the point, at least one of them deserved to be more 3-dimensional and have a better character arc.

The Night Thief

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