The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy

When disgraced former police officer Harriet Kealty discovers a plea for help in the margins of a second-hand book, she sets out to unravel a mystery that quickly leads her to confront some uncomfortable ties to her own life, including her ex-lover, Ben.

Following the deaths of his close friends, Ben became an adoptive father to their orphaned son Elliot. But Harriet suspects that Ben knows more about these deaths than he’s willing to say…

What starts as a simple investigation becomes something entirely different in this moving story that will open hearts and minds as it answers the question: what would you do for one more moment with someone that you love?

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The Other Side of Night is a novel that I’ve found quite difficult to review.  I enjoyed it – it’s a great novel – but it would be very easy to spoil it for other readers, and that’s obviously something that I want to avoid.  The following review may be a little briefer than usual for that reason. I’ll let you decide whether or not that’s a good thing 😳

The main character is Harriett Kealty.  She’s someone that I immediately felt sympathetic towards as it’s clear from the outset that she’s having a particularly bad time of things.  She has been dismissed from her role in the police and while we don’t find out why until later in the novel, it’s clear that Harriett feels that her dismissal was unjustified and that she was thrown under the bus by her supervising officer.  She has no idea what to do instead.  She is also lonely having suffered a breakup some months earlier from the person that she thought might be “the one”, with little explanation given as to why the relationship was ending.  Having been all but ghosted by him, she’s understandably struggling to move on.

I really like Harriett as a character. The down on their luck detective is a common figure in fiction, but Hamdy puts a different spin on it, resulting in a unique and refreshing character who feels more realistic than some.  Rather than someone trying to forget their past or drown their sorrows, we feel Harriett’s anger and hurt at being betrayed by both her colleagues and a potential lover, and the resulting fear and sadness as she must decide how to move on with her life.  As I got to know her, I couldn’t help but wonder what she had been dismissed for as she isn’t the sort to break the rules, and it makes her dismissal all the more puzzling. 

A chance discovery in a second-hand book catches the attention of the detective in her, and she soon begins to do some digging, albeit with few resources and no authority whatsoever.  I do have to question whether people would be so willing to talk to someone so openly in those circumstances, and her former partner seems a little too willing to support her investigation and provide information to Harriett when she needs it.  That said, the mystery that Harriett stumbles upon is a compelling and unusual one, and I was happy to read on for that reason.

Through flashbacks, we learn of the brief and ill-fated romance between Harriett and Ben.  When they met, there was an immediate connection on both sides, and so the reader can’t help but wonder why Ben ended what seemed like a promising relationship as he did.  Of course, Harriett’s investigation brings Ben back into her life.  You may think that this is stretching coincidence a little too far, but there is a reason for it, and if the hows, whys, and wherefores take a little while to be revealed, I recommend sticking with it – it’s worth it to understand how it all comes together.

For the first half of the novel, the plot follows fairly standard lines as Harriett investigates the question prompted in the second-hand book and as she tries to find the motivation to pull herself out of the slump she’s in when we first meet her.  The second half of the novel goes in a very different direction, putting a very different spin on the usual police-procedural.  I really can’t say any more than that, except that The Other Side of Night is a novel that I thoroughly enjoyed, and one that I recommend provided that you don’t mind novels that cross genre-boundaries.