End of Story
“I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.”
So writes Sebastian Trapp, reclusive mystery novelist, to his longtime correspondent Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction. With mere months to live, Trapp invites Nicky to his spectacular San Francisco mansion to help draft his life story . . . living alongside his beautiful second wife, Diana; his wayward nephew, Freddy; and his protective daughter, Madeleine. Soon Nicky finds herself caught in an irresistible case of real-life “detective fever.”
“You and I might even solve an old mystery or two.”
Twenty years earlier—on New Year’s Eve 1999—Sebastian’s first wife and teenaged son vanished from different locations, never to be seen again. Did the perfect crime writer commit the perfect crime? And why has he emerged from seclusion, two decades later, to allow a stranger to dig into his past?
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”
As Nicky attempts to weave together the strands of Sebastian’s life, she becomes obsessed with discovering the truth . . . while Madeleine begins to question what her beloved father might actually know about that long-ago night. And when a corpse appears in the family’s koi pond, both women are shocked to find that the past isn’t gone—it’s just waiting.
Daniel Mallory
is an American author who writes crime fiction under the name A. J. Finn. His 2018 novel The Woman in the Window debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. The Woman in the Window was adapted into a feature film of the same name, directed by Joe Wright and featuring Amy Adams, Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman.
In 2019 an article in the The New Yorker stated that Mallory had frequently lied about his personal life and health. Mallory obliquely acknowledged being deceptive in a statement. Mallory attributed his actions to his struggles with bipolar depressive disorder, which drew criticism from psychiatrists. His second novel, End of Story, was published in February 2024.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I’ve never come across a book so tangled and confusing. The truth is that the story lacks depth and is ambiguous. The author aimed to create something impactful, but it turned out to be a mess.
