Endless Night

 Christie, Agatha. Endless Night. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1967 Print

First Sentences:

In my end is my beginning ... That's a quotation I've often heard people say. It sounds all right -- but what does it really mean?

 

Description:

Sometimes you just need a good suspense novel to satifsy your reading itch. Not bloody, overly graphic, or even terrifying. Just a plot and characters that strike your curiosity so much that you have to keep reading, sometimes peeking out between your fingers which are hiding your eyes. You don't want to know what is going to happen but you cannot stop reading. Delicious!

Enter Agatha Christie's Endless Night. This is a simple story of a man, wandering between jobs and relationships, looking rather vaguely for the perfect woman, a beautiful home, and wealth to fall intoUp in his lap.

I could feel all the feeling surging up in me. I wanted a wonderful woman and a wonderful house like nobody else's house, and I wanted my wonderful house to be full of wonderful things -- things that belonged to me. Everything would belong to me.

Incredibly, that all his dreams actually happen, almost without him even realizing it. He meets and falls in love with a woman who turns out to be ultra-wealthy and in love with him as well. They set out to buy the perfect lot of hillside land and build their dream house, well, almost a castle.

Their plan is despite warnings from locals and a specific gypsy woman that the land is cursed. Years ago the owner had chased gypsies from squatting on his land and received a dreadful curse aimed at anyone trying to settle there. You as a reader cannot wait for something eerie to happen to this nice couple and then see how they escape or succumb to it.

What a mysterious thing sleep is. You go to bed worrying about gipsies and secret enemies and detectives planted in your house and the possibilities of kidnapping and a hundred other things, and sleep whisks you away from it all. You travel very far and you don't know where you've been, but when you wake up, it's to a totally new world. No worries, no apprehensions.

But being an Agatha Christie novel, this curse and its results are just the surface. The novel's ending reveals twist upon twist on the plot and characters as they struggle to confront the curse and live their love-filled lives. The conclusion was completely unexpected by me and maybe will be for you as well. 

Wonderful tenseness and anticipation to this seemingly quiet plot and couple awaits readers on every page. Impossible to put down to the very last page, my favorite kind of story. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca.   

A young bride it taken to live with her husband in his sprawling mansion, Manderly. Unfortunately, it is not those supportive environment for her, from house to housekeeper to the looming memory of her husband's first wife. Suspense at its best.