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Summary
Summary
Three hundred gone. Just six left.
The building was once home to families, friends, children, couples, love, life. Now, almost every apartment is empty, the inhabitants forced out by the developers tearing down the old social housing to build luxury homes.
Only a few of the inhabitants have fought back against the attempts to evict them from their homes and their histories. And they have been joined by passionate student protester and would-be journalist, Ella, who is leading a high-profile media campaign to protect those who refuse to leave.
One night, Ella returns home to find a horrible scene awaiting her-the dead body of a mysterious man. Panicked, she calls her neighbor Molly, who convinces her that the police won't believe she's innocent. Together the two women concoct a gruesome plan to hide the body.
But the secret won't stay buried for long. As truth hangs in the balance, a neighbor tells Molly he had heard Ella arguing with a man in the hallway and mistrust grows between Ella and Molly, as repercussions of that night threaten to change both women's lives forever.
Author Notes
Eva Dolan was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Dagger for unpublished authors when she was just a teenager. Her Zigic and Ferreira crime series, featuring two detectives from the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, debuted in 2014 and has been optioned for British television. Tell No Tales and After You Die-- the second and third books in the series--were shortlisted for the Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year Award and After You Die was also longlisted for the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger. This is How it Ends is her first standalone mystery. Dolan lives in Essex, England.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British crime writer Dolan (the Zigic and Ferreira series) delivers an intriguing standalone about a crime involving a London police official's daughter and secret motives. Narrator and protagonist Ella Riordan, a police academy dropout and aspiring writer, meets the novel's second narrator, Molly Fader, a photographer who documents protest movements, when a policeman bashes Ella during a peaceful demonstration. The two, now friends united by their revolutionary spirit, join forces to protest the real estate developers taking over Molly's apartment building in order to build more expensive high-rise buildings while the dwindling tenants put up with horrific conditions. Ella, hoping to make the place a cause célèbre to enhance her revolutionary credentials, throws a party there. Someone from Ella's past crashes the party and ends updead by Ella's hand-in self-defense, Ella claims to Molly. Molly believes Ella's claim and helps her make it look like an accident. Is Ella who she says she is, or are her real intentions nefarious? The novel is cleverly plotted; Dolan nicely ramps up suspense on the way to its shocking ending. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
What is the price to be paid for lifelong social activism? Thats the question posed by Eva Dolans This Is How It Ends (Raven, £12.99). Molly is an old-school campaigner whose life has been dedicated to everything from the Greenham Common peace camp in the 1980s and 90s to opposing the gentrification of a semi-derelict tower block in the present day. She has become a kind of surrogate mother to the youthful Ella, similarly known to the police after her involvement in demonstrations touched by violence. And an act of violence drives the women even closer together, when Molly helps her friend conceal the accidental death of a man who assaulted her. After they dispose of his corpse in a lift shaft, retribution begins to close like a steel trap around the women. Dolan is expert at the orchestration of tension, right up to the vertiginous climax. This first stand-alone novel her earlier work featured hate-crime coppers Zigic and Ferreira also adds a new layer to the authors trenchant social commentary. While the authorities are presented in unsympathetic fashion, Mollys unending crusades over a variety of issues have not filled the void in her life that initially propelled her along this path. Dolan seems to suggest that organic human interaction is preferable to a lifetime of battling for right-on causes. Ask aficionados who is Britains finest thriller writer, and many would answer the veteran Gerald Seymour, whose career has spanned four decades. Though his recent work has lacked rigour, A Damned Serious Business (Hodder, £17.99) sees him once again firing on all cylinders. With customary topicality, the new book presents Russian hackers as the frontline warriors in a new cold war. With Russian electoral interference on both sides of the Atlantic, MI6 case officer Edwin Coker initiates the disruption of this secret operation, not with a computer virus but a bomb, delivered across the border by a young criminal hacker suborned by MI6. He is to be shepherded by the seasoned soldier Merc: the hazardous mission is palm-sweatily convincing. The German writer Dirk Kurbjuweit has frequently interviewed politicians such as Angela Merkel, but its the personal rather than the political that powers Fear (translated by Imogen Taylor, Orion, £12.99). Kurbjuweit, deputy editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, transmutes into fiction the real-life experiences of his own family, victims of a stalker who was careful to keep within the law. We first encounter Berlin architect Randolph Tiefenthaler sitting with his father in prison: the latter has killed the tenant of the basement below his sons upscale apartment, the unstable Tiberius, who has sexually harassed Randolphs wife and accused the couple of abusing their children. Tiberius, a beneficiary of Germanys welfare system, was protected from eviction, and as he grew more threatening, bloodshed became inevitable. But is the cold-blooded execution carried out by Randolphs father all that it appears to be? While the tenser sections of the novel are handled efficiently enough, the real interest lies in the astringent picture of middle-class German society, with its schism between the haves and have-nots, something weve not seen before in contemporary crime fiction. Hitchcocks Rear Window is a gift that keeps on giving, from Paula Hawkinss The Girl on the Train to the latest riff, The Woman in the Window (HarperCollins, £12.99) by AJ Finn. As with Hawkins, we have a booze-addicted woman with a dysfunctional life, Dr Anna Fox. When not watching Hitchcock films (Finn is refreshingly open about the source of his inspiration), Anna uses the zoom lens of her camera to spy on the comfortable life of her neighbours, the Russells. But as is de rigueur for this subgenre Anna observes something horrific and is confronted with the inevitable question: will anyone believe her? Finn does not attempt to conceal the shopworn elements, but confronts them head-on and rings some bracing changes. A J Finn is really Dan Mallory, a US publisher who knows just what makes popular thrillers work. How would it feel to be trapped within ones own body, able to see, smell and hear but unable to communicate? If I Die Before I Wake by Emily Koch (Harvill Secker, £12.99) is audaciously told from the point of view of Alex, a victim of locked-in syndrome after an accident. Initially yearning for death, Alex then tries to discover what has happened to him; he is perhaps solving his own murder. Its a clever premise, and though Koch takes her time before really getting to grips with the material, this is a debut to be reckoned with. - Barry Forshaw.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Dolan was short-listed for the British Crime Writers' Association Dagger when she was just a teenager. Her Zigic and Ferreira crime series, featuring two detectives from the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, debuted in 2014 and has been optioned for British television. In this stand-alone, her ability to write a complex and nuanced psychological thriller is clearly manifest. Two women, Ella and Molly, have been working with an anti-gentrification faction to protect the remaining residents of a social-housing building in London slated for demolition. When Ella finds the dead body of an unknown man in her flat, Molly convinces her that the police won't believe she's innocent because of her unpopular political affiliations, and the two women hide the body. But when a neighbor tells Molly that he heard Ella arguing with a man in the hallway, and Ella learns some compromising information about Molly, their close relationship begins to unravel. Told from their alternating perceptions, backward and forward through time, the story takes a considerable amount of concentration to follow, but it pays off in a stunning conclusion that makes you want to reread the whole book to figure out how you missed what was really going on. Recommend to fans of social realism in crime fiction, from Georges Simenon straight on through to Dennis Lehane.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This is how it begins: a rooftop party in London celebrates the resolve of tenacious tenants to remain in their poky building despite the threats of overreaching property developers to force them out. Ella -Riordan is the poster face of protest, attractive, as well as the daughter of a high-ranking police official. Before it is over, she ends up with a dead body on her hands and seeks the help of her friend and longtime protester Molly Fader to help her dispose of the corpse down the elevator shaft. The remainder of the story follows Molly from the party onward, while Ella's story unspools backward from the party to the events leading up to it. The emphasis is not so much on the identity of the body as on the meaning of different types of solidarity: the bonds uniting protesters, the relationships among women, the power of the thin blue line, and the links between reporters and their sources. This is a telling snapshot of a London recognizable today from Occupy London protests and absentee oligarchical landlords to such tragedies as the Grenfell Tower fire. VERDICT Dolan's stand-alone psychological mystery follows her successful "Zigic and Ferreira" crime series, which has been nominated for major mystery awards, and will appeal to fans of socially conscious fiction.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
