Customer Reviews

End of Story: A Novel of Suspense

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Ordinarily I'm pretty cynical about blurbs, but when Stephen King recommends an author, I'm all ears. I think he actually reads the books he recommends; he's never let me down yet.

Peter Abrahams is a suspense novelist, but he spends more time developing his lead character than most. Ivy Seidel is a very compelling character. She's an MFA graduate working as a bartender. When her friend sells a screen play to Hollywood, she agrees to take over his creative writing class at Dannemora. She promptly falls for one of her students, Vance Harrow, who seems to have more talent than she does.

A subplot deals with a story Ivy is trying to sell to THE NEW YORKER, entitled "Cave Man." Abrahams makes this jell when we're introduced to her caveman class. They include gang members and thugs who also seem to have a lot of innate talent, but they're incredibly violent. One of her students is a white collar criminal named Felix Balaban who has incited the wrath of Luis Morales, a gang member who feels Felix has disrespected him.

When Ivy investigates Harrow's background she discovers he was involved in a Casino robbery, but she's convinced he's innocent. She sets out to prove it.

I'm usually a slow reader, but I read this story in a couple of days. However, it has a couple of drawbacks. For one thing, the police officers who help Ivy investigate Harrow's background go way out of their way to help her. She's a fiction writer, not an investigative reporter. And she's never published anything. Certainly she's attractive, but that's not enough motivation. There's also a scene where she needs an extension ladder. The ladder reaches all the way to the third floor of a hospital. She drives a little Saab upon the roof of which she ties the ladder. She also crawls up that ladder like a Chinese acrobat, all the way to the last couple of rungs. But those are just minor quibbles; what really got my hackles up was the ironic ending. Arahams settles for clever rather than appropriateness.

I was all set to give this book five stars until I ran up against that disappointing ending, but that won't stop me from ordering another Abrahams suspense novel; he's written fourteen others, including OBLIVION, THEIR WILDEST DREAMS, and THE TUTOR.

This novel starts out okay, with a likable, pretty heroin in an unusual situation, and good writing too--but the second half of the book is a far reach, way beyond what can be convincing. The key bit that has her haul around a long, heavy extension ladder and then climb it to the third-story window of a hospital with a two-foot bolt cutter tucked in her belt would be a feat worthy of Wonder Woman. Then to expect the bad guy to come to a desolate meeting point alone and unarmed is the height of naivety. And those are just examples of why I became so disappointed in what promised to be a good read.

I don't understand why some supposed "thrillers" get such wonderful reviews. This book has a good set-up, but the protagonist's actions are so insipid, they're unbelievable. The ending is almost as bad as Donna Tartt's equally overhyped "The Little Friend" ...that is to say very uninspired, lazy, and ultimately a huge disappointment. If you want a great thriller about a writer, with terrific character development and a non-stop plot that actually has you caring about what happens, get John Colapinto's "About the Author" and you'll have a much more satisfying read.

Peter Abrahams grabs us by the hand and doesn't let go - we may be resisting, planting our heels in the dirt, but we just can't get free. End of Story is suspenseful, thrilling and maddening. We are expected to believe that love and a desire to right an injustice would cause our main character Ivy to do what she does, but it just doesn't add up. Her actions sometimes seem like just a means to advance the plot.
A character in the book asks Ivy if "prison stuff hasn't been done to death" and she reflects on what her writing teacher said "Everything's up for grabs - it all depends on the angle of attack." It appears that the effort to create a fresh angle drove the plot and resulted in characters that are not always believable. A page-turner though!

End of the Story features a very likeable and intelligent heroine. This expertly crafted, immaculately researched and enthralling suspense thriller had me up till dawn because I couldn't put it down.

Ivy Seidel is an aspiring writer struggling along while receiving rejection letters left and right. She has even begun to doubt her own abilities, and her finances are becoming a problem. When she has suddenly offered an opportunity to teach creative writing for actual pay at a maximum-security prison, she figures she has nothing to lose and it is an opportunity to hang on awhile longer while hoping for her dream break into being published.

To Ivy's surprise, she finds she really enjoys her excursions to the prison and interaction with her maximum-security writing class. As she discovers, one of her students, Vince Harrow, is quite an enigma. She discovers he has an extraordinary gift for writing. Becoming intrigued with finding such talent within the prison walls, she begins her own investigation into his case. She comes to believe Harrow may be innocent. But then why did he plead guilty? As she delves further, asking questions and digging into an intricate weave of lies and half-truths, Ivy's world is turned upside down and her very life itself is put into jeopardy. Will she survive? What is the truth, and is it worth the cost?

Abrahams has written a compelling novel filled with psychological tension. This is an engrossing, character driven story that sucks you right in. Be warned, once started, you won't be able to put this one down."

I'll admit this book starts out slowly and perhaps some people didn't "get it" because it isn't just a suspense tale. The title hints at the deeper layers: "End of Story: A Novel of Suspense". This book is as much about writing and the process of creating a story as it is about the actual story - although I happen to think the story itself is plenty suspenseful - and believable. Where does truth and fiction intersect? How do our lives affect our writing and how do other people change our story, even as we're writing it? These are just a few of the questions raised by this book.
Basic plot? A writer is offered a job teaching a writing workshop for inmates at a local jail. One of her students is an amazingly good writer and WHAT he writes leads her to question whether he is truly guilty or not. She can't stop thinking about what he wrote and becomes determined to discover what is "truth" and what is "fiction". In the process, she begins to create her own story and her life becomes part of that story until the reader reaches the "end of story".
I found it all to be clever and I couldn't put it down. I'll admit this may be because I love writing and thinking about stories and various plots. But I also got totally hooked by this book and its plot - and I'm surprised more people here (at least, those who wrote a review here) did not.

Ivy Seidel, an aspiring New York writer, works as a waitress in a New York bar while trying to make ends meet and maintain her precarious position on the lower slopes of MFA Olympus. When a friend gets lucky and takes off for Hollywood, Ivy inherits his gig of teaching writing to prisoners at Dannemora, a facility way upstate that bewitches her with its scent of raw masculinity. The men she meets in jail make all other men seem like wimps. One in particular catches her eye, a charismatic and gentle giant called Vance Harrow.

While in Manhattan she tries to resist the advances of a slick investment banker, Danny Weinberg who, as it turns out, has an acquaintance who works for The New Yorker, and who tries to help her place a story "Caveman," in the journal's august pages, figuring if she made it there, her career would be a sure thing. Ivy is a fascinating creature, beautiful as Carole Lombard, but withdrawn and introverted, with a lingering doubt about her own skills as a writer that leave her vulnerable to--well, love I suppose.

I don't know if Abrahams is 100 per cent comfortable with writing about the low lives he has to animate when it comes time for Ivy to investigate Harrow's supposed crime in the casino. The people of the dead-end Spoon River town whom she meets seem variously undeveloped, idealistically "honest," or brain-dead. However that doesn't mean I didn't want to read about them, just noticing that for Abrahams, the middle class has more secrets to uncover. The working class has had all the mystery poumnded out of them by the cruelties of birth.

I don't know how Peter Abrahams does it, but he has me racing from page to page like a gazelle leaping from peak to peak in the Andes. He seems to know everything about setting the scene and about setting a match to a trail of narrative gasoline. Whoosh! In a minute the story catches fire and never lets go until its last fatal love chase. You never get the same book twice with Abrahams, and while some of his books are dearer to me than others, all are winners. You just can't go wrong when you're in his hands.

Peter Abrahams is becoming my favorite author. This is the second book of his I have read (the first being,Oblivion ) and it is really hard to put down.

Whenever you sit and wonder why on earth women fall in love with conflicts, you can think about this story and, on some small level, understand.

This (like Oblivion) is a smart, sexy thriller that keeps you on the edge of the seat.

I enjoyed this book for a while.

The set up was intriguing and I expected some interesting character development and suspense.

Instead, the book became more and more far fetched and silly as it went along.

Barely mediocre.

This is one of those stories where the reader knows the main character is making all the wrong decisions but has to sit back and watch the main character cause their own downfall. In this story, the main character is Ivy, who is an aspiring writer. She gets an opportunity to teach some convicts a writing course up at a penitentiary. One of the convicts (Harrow) seems to have a writing skill that is greater than what a convict should have. Ivy starts to be infatuated with Harrow and proving that he wasn't guilty of the crime he was convicted of eight years prior (supposedly he and three other guys had robbed a casino where three people died during the robbery).

Right from the start the reader can see there is something very dark about Harrow but unfortunately Ivy doesn't see it. The further she gets involved she starts to plan breaking him out of a prison infirmary (he gets sent there after he is injured in a class fight). The book is like a long drawn out episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents and you need to get to the very last sentence of the book to have everything resolved. I found this book to be above average (about 3 ½ stars).