Brief Thoughts: The Other Side of Midnight

The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

~ Goodreads ~

Rating:  3.5 Stars

London, 1925.  Glamorous medium Gloria Sutter made her fortune helping the bereaved contact loved ones killed during the Great War.  Now she's been murdered at one of her own séances, after leaving a message requesting the help of her former friend and sole rival, Ellie Winter.

Ellie doesn't contact the dead—at least, not anymore.  She specializes in miraculously finding lost items.  Still, she can't refuse the final request of the only other true psychic she has known.  Now Ellie must delve into Gloria's secrets and plunge back into the world of hucksters, lowlifes, and fakes.  Worse, she cannot shake the attentions of handsome James Hawley, a damaged war veteran who has dedicated himself to debunking psychics.

As Ellie and James uncover the sinister mysteries of Gloria's life and death, Ellie is tormented by nightmarish visions that herald the grisly murders of those in Gloria's circle. And as Ellie’s uneasy partnership with James turns dangerously intimate, an insidious evil force begins to undermine their quest for clues, a force determined to bury the truth, and whoever seeks to expose it...

The Other Side of Midnight has a very strong start and a great premise.  Ellie is a great character, and I liked her from the first introduction, wherein she messes with the mind of one of her clients because her psychic powers tell her that he's lying to her, and that he's got ulterior motives.  I loved Ellie's blunt, heck care attitude, although I did get frustrated on her behalf when she got dragged into a murder investigation under threat.

The murder mystery itself was quite full of twists, and the ending was unexpected, even if not entirely surprising.

This particular Simone St. James novel didn't really feature as many creepy, ghostly moments as the previous ones I've read of hers, but they were still well presented.

And while I liked the self-revelation journey that Ellie ends up going through, after a while I started finding some of the flashbacks a bit tedious, even if I DID understand why they were included.  Maybe because I just couldn't figure out the relationship between Ellie and Gloria, or maybe because I COULD figure it out and didn't really care much for it.  The flashbacks involving Ellie and her mother, however, I really enjoyed, and found them to be nicely done.

Meanwhile, the romance itself wasn't really all that front-and-center, even if it wasn't terrible either.  James Hawley didn't really stand out much as a main hero, so I didn't give him much thought.

Otherwise, a very enjoyable book with a gorgeous cover!