This Is How It Ends

January 22, 2018
British crime writer Dolan (the Zigic and Ferreira series) delivers an intriguing standalone about a crime involving a London police official’s daughter and secret motives. Narrator and protagonist Ella Riordan, a police academy dropout and aspiring writer, meets the novel’s second narrator, Molly Fader, a photographer who documents protest movements, when a policeman bashes Ella during a peaceful demonstration. The two, now friends united by their revolutionary spirit, join forces to protest the real estate developers taking over Molly’s apartment building in order to build more expensive high-rise buildings while the dwindling tenants put up with horrific conditions. Ella, hoping to make the place a cause célèbre to enhance her revolutionary credentials, throws a party there. Someone from Ella’s past crashes the party and ends updead by Ella’s hand—in self-defense, Ella claims to Molly. Molly believes Ella’s claim and helps her make it look like an accident. Is Ella who she says she is, or are her real intentions nefarious? The novel is cleverly plotted; Dolan nicely ramps up suspense on the way to its shocking ending.

December 1, 2017

This is how it begins: a rooftop party in London celebrates the resolve of tenacious tenants to remain in their poky building despite the threats of overreaching property developers to force them out. Ella Riordan is the poster face of protest, attractive, as well as the daughter of a high-ranking police official. Before it is over, she ends up with a dead body on her hands and seeks the help of her friend and longtime protester Molly Fader to help her dispose of the corpse down the elevator shaft. The remainder of the story follows Molly from the party onward, while Ella's story unspools backward from the party to the events leading up to it. The emphasis is not so much on the identity of the body as on the meaning of different types of solidarity: the bonds uniting protesters, the relationships among women, the power of the thin blue line, and the links between reporters and their sources. This is a telling snapshot of a London recognizable today from Occupy London protests and absentee oligarchical landlords to such tragedies as the Grenfell Tower fire. VERDICT Dolan's stand-alone psychological mystery follows her successful "Zigic and Ferreira" crime series, which has been nominated for major mystery awards, and will appeal to fans of socially conscious fiction.--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2018
Dolan was short-listed for the British Crime Writers' Association Dagger when she was just a teenager. Her Zigic and Ferreira crime series, featuring two detectives from the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, debuted in 2014 and has been optioned for British television. In this stand-alone, her ability to write a complex and nuanced psychological thriller is clearly manifest. Two women, Ella and Molly, have been working with an anti-gentrification faction to protect the remaining residents of a social-housing building in London slated for demolition. When Ella finds the dead body of an unknown man in her flat, Molly convinces her that the police won't believe she's innocent because of her unpopular political affiliations, and the two women hide the body. But when a neighbor tells Molly that he heard Ella arguing with a man in the hallway, and Ella learns some compromising information about Molly, their close relationship begins to unravel. Told from their alternating perceptions, backward and forward through time, the story takes a considerable amount of concentration to follow, but it pays off in a stunning conclusion that makes you want to reread the whole book to figure out how you missed what was really going on. Recommend to fans of social realism in crime fiction, from Georges Simenon straight on through to Dennis Lehane.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)