What is this about?
Jack Quick is asked to find out who murdered Sam Midford — mind you, Sam Midford committed suicide on national TV.
What else is this about?
This is a character-drive mystery about guilt, the power of words and letting go.
Blurb
An electrifying thriller with a mind-bending premise: One million viewers witness a popular TV presenter commit suicide live on air – yet his twin brother is convinced it was murder.
How can it be murder when the victim pulled the trigger?
At 9.01 pm, TV presenter Sam Midford delivers the monologue for his popular current affairs show Mr Midnight. He seems nervous and the crew are convinced he’s about to propose to his girlfriend live on air.
Instead, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head.
Sam’s grief-stricken brother Harry is convinced his brother was murdered. But how can that be, when one million viewers witnessed Sam pull the trigger?
Only Jack Quick, a disgraced television producer in the last days of a prison sentence, is desperate enough to take Harry’s money to investigate.
But as Jack starts digging, he finds a mystery more complex than he first assumed. And if he’s not careful, he’ll find out first-hand that there’s more than one way to kill someone . . .
After the events of Greenlight , Either Side of Midnight opens with Jack Quick in prison for the events of the first book — namely messing with evidence in a murder case. Just before he is released: two things happen: Sam Midford commits suicide on national TV and his twin brother Harry comes to ask Jack to investigate what he insists is his murder.
With every blurb comes certain expectations, but this is one of those cases where I didn’t mind the difference because this is a complicated character exploration of people who are grieving — the loss of loved ones, the loss of their dreams and the loss of the life they always wanted. And one of them killed Sam Midford — but how?
For all that the blurb hooked me in with an improbable murder and how it was committed, I felt the most compelling parts of the book was the characterisation and exploration of grief and lost chances wrapped around very, very different characters.
This was not what I expected in the second book in this series, in fact it was better!
Jack agrees to this improbable case because he wants enough money to keep his brother, Liam, alive. Liam has been in a persistent vegetative state since his early teens, and Jack’s success meant he and his father had money to get Liam the equipment he needed and a nurse to watch over him. But Jack’s lost his job, his reputation and has been in jail for almost two years. When he gets out, his father is working at a bottle shop, and Jack needs the money Harry has promised him to ease his father’s burden.
Except, his father is also ready to let Liam go, and Jack isn’t; in fact his bulimia stems from what happened to Liam the fateful day he fell and was injured, and the consequences of it after.
Harry saw his brother commit suicide on TV and doesn’t want to let him go. They were estranged for years, and each was too proud to make the first move — to say they forgive each other. Harry insists that Sam would never have committed suicide, but when Jack begins his investigation, Harry begins to realise that as much as they were brothers, and he knew his brother, there were some parts of Sam’s life he didn’t know anything about.
And that takes Harry and Jack to the town where the Midford twins grew up and their history before they made it to TV.
Jack begins to realise that Sam’s past may played a part in his present, and his death. That’s when he begins to examine the power of words and how they may have affected Sam.
From there, Stevenson expertly takes readers with Jack as he begins to delve into the characters in this improbable murder case, and begins to understand them — Sam Midford especially. It’s then that the Stevenson’s skill at characterisation is clear, for no one in this book is who they claim to be — not Harry, and not Sam.
The Either Side of Midnight is a skilfully plotted mystery, with superb characterisation that will keep readers engrossed from beginning to end.
