Book 21 (of 52) – The Night Shift

The Night Shift – Alex Finlay

On New Year’s Eve of 1999, a tragedy at the local Blockbuster Video stuns a New Jersey town, especially when the suspected killer goes on the lam.  Fifteen years later, a similar attack at a local ice cream parlor leads everyone to assume the killer has returned.  While the local police investigate the new murders, an FBI agent looks into the older crime, hoping to find connections.  Instead, she unravels a web of lies that ties more than those two crimes together.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t read two books from the same author twice within a month’s time, but the Chicago Public Library served up The Night Shift, the second novel from Alex Finlay, just weeks after I read his first outing.  In some ways, this may have ended up being a good thing, as I was able to see some growth from Every Last Fear going into The Night Shift that I may not have recognized if it were months or years down the line.  The downside, of course, is that I won’t get another crack at his work for quite some time.  I look forward to what comes next and hopefully continuing the adventures of FBI Agent Keller.

Book 16 (of 52) – Every Last Fear

Every Last Fear – Alex Finlay

In Every Last Fear, the debut novel from Alex Finlay, an NYU student, infamous due to a streaming documentary about his family’s fight to clear his older brother of murder, has his world turned upside down when his entire family dies during a trip to Mexico.  What initially looked like an accident turns into a murder investigation, and the young student, with the help of a financial crimes FBI agent, has to figure out what’s going on and why.

I stumbled across a synopsis of Finlay’s upcoming second book, which looked interesting enough for me to track down this work.  Finlay puts together a pretty good tale, but it came off to me like more of a mystery than a thriller and the ending was fairly easy to figure out.  But, there was enough here to continue on to his new book at some point.