Mike Finn's Reviews > The Murder After the Night Before

'The Murder After The Night Before' isn't the light, witty but dark book that the cover and the title had led me to expect. It's a hard-hitting thriller that delivers the full emotional impact of murder, sexual assault, revenge porn/shame porn, all aggravated by the main character's habitual binge drinking, low self-esteem, grief and constant simmering anger.

The book feels witty at first because humour is one of the techniques that Molly Monroe uses as a coping mechanism. So, initially, the fact that Molly wakes in her own bed with no knowledge of how she got there or of the identity of the hot, fully clothed man who is lying next to her seems comic rather than sinister.

The humour is quickly pushed aside by a growing sense of dread followed by overwhelming grief as Molly starts to discover what happened the night before.

Within hours, Molly's life is in ruins and she has almost no one she can trust, including herself. As she struggles to knit together the fragments of memory that remain to her, Molly starts to dread finding out what she actually did on the evening when her best friend was killed.

I was impressed by Katy Brent's ability to make depression and shame and grief feel so real while still weaving an absorbing, page-turning mystery.

'The Murder After The Night Before' isn't a light read. Much of the action is driven by misogyny. There is abuse on almost every page: ranging from gaslighting and old-boy-network cover-ups through online shaming to sexual assault and murder. The impact of all of these things on Molly Monroe is amplified by her history of binge drinking, her doubts about her own mental health, her low self-esteem, her habit of being viciously judgemental when she has been drinking, her social isolation, her grief for her murdered friend and her growing guilt about having at best failed her friend and at worst having contributed to her death.

'The Murder After The Night Before' has twenty-eight chapters. The first twenty-six chapters (93% of the book) were a five-star read that kept me so engaged with Molly that I was reluctant to put the book down.

I felt that the last two dropped the ball. The pace and the timeline changed. The encounter between Molly and her dad is well-written and provides an insight into how Molly's character was formed but I felt it came too late in the narrative. Placed as it was, it felt wedged in. The description of the murder was also well-written, but the change in point-of-view was jarring and placing it after the identity of the murderer had already been revealed made it feel like an add-on rather than the central scene it might have been. The final chapter made me a little impatient. In contrast to the vivid realism of the rest of the book, this was hard to believe, took too long and felt like a forced silver lining.

Despite the ending, 'The Murder After The Night Before' is a great piece of work and I recommend it to you.