Endless Night

I know there are a number of fellow lovers of vintage crime fiction out there, but I suspect quite a few of them think Dame Agatha is not quite up to scratch -- good at plotting, not so great at characterisation and dialogue, maybe? If you are one of those, and have not read this novel, give it a go! I am certain you will be be pleasantly surprised. This is a very different kind of book from the Marples and Poirots we are all so familiar with. The story is told in the first person, by a young man, Michael Rogers. Charming, attractive, but lacking any real direction in life, he has been drifting from job to job in a pretty unfocussed way. All that changes when he visits a small country village and falls in love with a run-down country estate known as Gypsy's Acre and develops a passionate desire to build a house there. On the same day he meets a young American girl,  Ellie Guteman, who he marries secretly after a whirlwind romance. Ellie proves to be stupendously rich, and together they are able to buy the estate and employ an astonishingly talented young architect to build their dream house, despite being quite disturbed by the warnings of an elderly gypsy woman that the place brings nothing but bad luck to its inhabitants. At first all seems to go well for them, but events take a darker turn -- more than that I can't say, but believe me, the twist at the end was quite a shock to me.
There are many things I would like to say about this book but unfortunately I can't say any of them without giving too much away. So you will have to take it from me that the narrative and the plot and the characterisation are all done with immense skill. It's one of those books that you want to start again from the beginning as soon as you have finished it, to see exactly how wrongly you interpreted certain events and to admire the writer's skill in so brilliantly misdirecting you. Great stuff.