Book Review: The Night Shift by Alex Finlay
An enjoyable read, but perhaps the weight of my expectations on this one proved a little too heavy.
I had heard about The Night Shift from the Booktube community in the US and thought it sounded right up my street, so when I saw digital advance copies were available in the UK I jumped at the chance to request one.
The premise had me lured in straight away: a Y2K setting, a spree killing at a Blockbuster video store, the possibility of a copycat killer or even the original back in the modern day — let’s just say I didn’t take much persuasion to jump in to what I hoped would be a nostalgia kick in the same vein as Riley Sager’s Survive the Night or Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark!
However, I found this book didn’t go in the direction I expected it to. Rather than being focused mostly on the lone survivor of the original attack, as I had for some reason assumed, The Night Shift is instead a multi-viewpoint story that ended up being much more of a police procedural than I had anticipated.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it reminded me in some ways of Criminal Minds, my old favourite TV series. But I admit that I did find myself getting a little confused between the viewpoints at times, particularly with our survivor…
