Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) any other remuneration for this review.
Not to be confused with Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight or with Terri Marie's The Wrong Side of Midnight, or with Mia Zachary's Another Side of Midnight, or M D Nygaard's The Other Side of Midnight, or Patrick DiCiccio's The Jagged Side of Midnight...do you see where I'm going with this? Pick a more distinctive title please? My new title is going to be The Clichéd Side of Midnight, or An Order of 11:59pm, with Midnight on the Side or maybe, yeah: The Half-Assed Side of Midnight....
I'm brand new to Natasha Mostert and I've brashly taken on three of her novels so I sincerely hope she doesn’t let me down! This one is Mostert's debut novel, first published in 1999, but republished with some serious editing last year. Let me offer a full disclosure up front, that I do not believe in any supernatural crap and the reason for this is reason itself! I've seen no valid or even useful evidence for the existence of any of it: gods, devils, demons, magic (black, white, or grey), witchcraft (as opposed to Wicca, which does exist, but is nothing more than a harmless belief, unlike major religions), ESP, clairvoyance, astrology, telekinesis, ghosts, etc., etc., etc. Neither do I believe in UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster (although I did write a novel about it!) and so on. I do, however, love a really good story about any of these topics on the rare occasion I can find one. I'm hoping this is a rare occasion!
First impressions were good. Mostert is a descriptive writer with an eye for a turn of phrase, although she's a bit too fond of 'vertiginous' and I'm not convinced she's using it correctly, but I’ll give her the benefit on that score! Having said that, she doesn’t dally too much, moving the story along with a playful tease here, some disturbing suspense there, just to keep your imagination tickled. There are some bits here and there which become bogged down in memory/flashback, and a bit too much detail for the minor characters, but not enough to tick me off. I do confess to disappointment in her female protagonist. I prefer a good strong female character, and Isabelle is a bit of a wuss, but I am trying to overlook that and some of her sorry behaviors (more anon) as I read this. Or should I say behaviours, since this is set in Britain?
With regard to the setting, kudos! It begins in South Africa, which is where Isabelle is resident, but she's called to Britain by the death of her best friend Alette. A death I immediately suspected as being rather more than accidental, suspicious old me. This actually distracted me because it reminded me of a short story I wrote, but let’s not dwell on that. What I want to mention is how thoroughly Americanized the writing world is - at least the one in which I've been immersed for evidently too long. When this novel mentioned flying from South Africa to the UK, I was lost for a minute. I had assumed this was set in the US, so this itinerary thoroughly confused me! How god-awfully sad is that?! I was thrilled to be proven wrong.
Anyway, enough rambling. So Isabelle is awakened early one morning by a phone-call from Alette, on a really bad line, asking fro Isabelle's help, and implying serious problems. When she receives another call later that morning from Alette's lawyer, informing her of Alette's death in a car accident, Isabelle is shocked, but nowhere near as shocked as she is to discover that this death occurred two days prior to Alette's phone call!
Isabelle learns that not only is she Alette's sole beneficiary, she's also tasked by Alette with something which the lawyer says he needs to discuss with her in person. This is the first of my annoyances with Isabelle's personality - rather than rail against this, or at least object, she meekly complies, traveling to London. She learns that Alette left her three letters, each one to be dispensed to Isabelle on a weekly basis. The first of reveals how awful her originally ideal marriage to Justin was. It began perfectly, but, Alette reveals, it rapidly descended into Justin becoming a control freak in the most extreme ways possible short of physically imprisoning Alette. Even after she divorced him, he continued to stalk her, begging her to return to him, almost literally showering her with flowers and cards. The night she died, she had gone to have it out with him and get him off her back once and for all, and she was in the accident on her way home.
Justin isn't the only guy involved with Alette. Michael lives in a flat (apartment) across the street from Alette's house, and he has a habit of entering the house uninvited, of which Isabelle is unaware to begin with. The first time she meets Justin on this trip is also when he lets himself into the house, but she never tackles him on the matter, and never considers changing the locks! I must admit it crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't Justin who stalked Alette after the divorce, but Michael, pretending to be Justin? Or is there something else entirely going on?
Alette's request in the first envelope is that Isabelle help her get revenge upon Justin by bringing down his pharmaceutical company, and she details her plan for doing this with which, again annoyingly, Isabelle complies, since it involves "only" making three phone calls to stock-brokers, questioning the company's viability regarding manufacturing supplies, and mailing two letters (which Isabelle doesn't read). Isabelle, at this point, is a puppet whose strings are caught upon whomever happens to be closest. This isn’t a surprise given the flashbacks we get, disruptive to the story as they are. She accepts an invitation to dinner with Justin despite all she has read about him from Alette. The question is (for me anyway at this point): is she smart to do so - will this begin a friendship to show that Justin isn't quite as bad as he's painted, and it's Michael who's the bad guy, or is she sliding blindly down the same slippery road upon which Alette slid, and only Michael can save her? Interesting, huh? Except that it looks like Isabelle is going to need saving by one or other of these two guys, which doesn’t work well for me! Maybe I'm wrong!
The more I read of this, the more convinced I became that things might be backwards: that Alette is the villain, and Justin the wronged party, and that the lawyer, Lionel Darling is also a villain (especially given the reveal about his troubled childhood), and Michael, the too-friendly neighbor, merely a red-herring. I suspect both Michale and Lionel because Mostert has them both out of town - obviously in the hoe that when she writes more of her anonymous stalker's activities I will think it cannot be either of those guys. Hah! In short, Mostert was doing a wonderful job of screwing with my mind! It has also occurred to me that Alette is still alive, and/or that Darling was orchestrating the whole thing using Alette as a ruse, using Isabelle to pose as The Wisdom and undermine Justin's corporation with her phone-calls for Darling's own purposes. One after another, new theories arose to explain the new information that Mostert leaked with cruelly metronomic ruthlessness, and even more cruel thrift.
I don't get the point of a weak character being the main protagonist in a novel unless they learn how to become strong over the course of the story. I can see how you could work it with a weak character depending upon the story you're telling, but in this one, it’s not working well for someone like me, who adores strong female characters. Well over half-way through, Isabelle shows no sign of taking charge of her life, constantly allowing herself to be led by the nose by various men, including Justin and Michael. Of course, she has a history of this. Alette did this to her throughout their childhood together, and even now is doing it from the grave. Isabelle also allowed a married man to do this to her back in South Africa. With Justin, even after she swore to herself that she wouldn't see him again, she lets him drag her out of the house (metaphorically speaking!) to go on a picnic on a day which is really too cold, and then take her on a tour of some of London's tourist spots.
I'm not going to reveal any more of this. I finished it (it's an easy read) and though the ending was a bit flat, I consider this to be a worthy novel. That's fortunate for me, since I have two more Mosterts to get through! Let me just conclude by saying that one of my guesses was, amazingly, spot on, but you're gonna have to read it find out which one (like you care!). That's the joy of making a sesquicentillion guesses - at least one of them is likely to be close! I don't know what this was like before she got in there and polished it up for re-release, but whatever she did was worth her efforts. I recommend this one.
