Book review: Hogmanay murders inflame ghosts of a smouldering past

Tyce's latest novel is dark but intensely readable

It ends at midnight is the latest novel from Harriet Tyce

• It Ends at Midnight
• Harriet Tyce
• Wildfire, £8.99

After studying English at Oxford and doing a legal conversion course, Harriet Tyce worked as a barrister for 10 years, before completing an MA in Crime Fiction at the University of East Anglia.

She burst onto the publishing scene in 2019 with her debut thriller, Blood Orange, a Sunday Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Book Club pick. 

In this, her third novel to feature successful barristers with complicated personal lives, Tyce mines her teenage years in Edinburgh to good effect: the desperate need to fit in at all costs; casual viciousness and seething jealousies; dire consequences flowing from lies told and secrets kept for decades.

It Ends At Midnight’ by Harriet Tyce 

Hogmanay in Edinburgh New Town, an exclusive party, fireworks lighting up the sky, two dead bodies impaled on cast iron railings outside a pristine Georgian house, a hungry fox licking at the blood that drips onto the footpath: with these scant details Tyce sets the scene for an intriguing mystery.

Who are these people and why did they die? Don’t expect a traditional murder investigation. Instead, Tyce rolls back the clock to earlier that same year, introducing us to the book’s protagonist. 

Sylvie is both a practising barrister and a part-time District Court judge (something that wouldn’t happen in this jurisdiction where all judges are full-time) with eyes on a promotion to Crown Court and beyond.

From early on, Tyce dials up the tension. The reader senses sooner than Sylvie that her plans are going to go awry.

She’s in a relationship with a younger man, Gareth, a chef, seemingly perfect, yet she hasn’t yet told her oldest friend (or frenemy?) Tess about him. 

When Sylvie at last decides that she must, Tess has her own news to share. She’s seriously ill.

Cleverly structured, Sylvie’s story unfolds in a dual timeline, the recent past and her school days in 1989/90. 

But Tyce keeps pulling us back to that fateful New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh too, skillfully weaving in the discovery, photographing, and processing of the dead, while simultaneously keeping our attention on what might have led to their grisly end.

Harriet Tyce author of It Ends At Midnight

It is in the procedurally rich courtroom scenes that readers will reap most of the benefit of Tyce’s legal background.

It’s there in the writing too — clean, efficient prose, letting the facts speak for themselves, permitting readers the freedom to come to their own conclusions, even if those conclusions are incorrect. Tyce wrongfoots the reader repeatedly, as is only proper.

The book is suffused with a sense of “growing terror”, “an intimation of impending doom”. Sylvie knows it, and so do we. When disaster strikes, only the immediate form it takes is a surprise. And there’s more to come.

The past has Sylvie firmly “in its grip”. 

She’s been “in denial for years, desperate to forget what happened that night, but now it’s come roaring back to life like a smouldering log at last given the oxygen it needs to burn”.

In the acknowledgments of It Ends at Midnight, Tyce makes reference to Everyone’s Invited, an internet campaign begun by Soma Shara that encourages victims, mostly in schools, to share testimony anonymously of their experiences of rape, sexual coercion, sharing of nude photographs and more.

Tyce says: “This horror worked its way through into my writing”. 

The resulting novel is dark but intensely readable; and it’s the perfect choice for anyone in need of a decent excuse to skip a New Year’s Eve party.