How did The Night It Ended end? (spoilers) | Katie Garner
This review contains spoilers for The Night It Ended by Katie Garner. If you are looking for a spoiler-free review, head back to the main page. You can always come back when you are done!
This book took a direction I did not expect! The Night it Ended has a gothic feel and an unsettling tone as a psychiatrist travels to a secluded girls’ boarding school over the holiday break to help find out more about a mysterious student death.
What is the setting for The Night it Ended?
Set in a secluded boarding school for troubled teenage girls, the events in the book take place over winter holidays when the grounds in upstate New York are covered in snow and darkness falls early. The school is mostly empty following fall term, with only a few students and staff on the premises.
The story is narrated by psychiatrist Dr. Madeline Pine. Interspersed between chapters in the current timeline are recorded interviews with an unnamed woman. Names are redacted, but the woman is telling the story of a disturbing series of events that lead to a horrific night. We aren’t sure exactly who this woman is or what happened until much later in the book, though readers will have plenty of theories.
What is The Night it Ended about?
Psychiatrist Dr. Madeline Pine is called to help investigate the death of a student at a boarding school for troubled girls in upstate New York. Despite her trepidation, Madeline agrees to go in part because she thinks of her own teenage daughter and wants to help the girl’s mother find closure.
Charlotte “Charley” Ridley was a student at Shadow Hunt Hall when she is found dead at the bottom of an icy ravine. Charley’s mother doesn’t believe it was an accident, though. She thinks that this was a murder and she wants to understand who did it and why. She contracts PI Matthew Reyes to investigate who requests the consultation from Madeline based on her book specializing in female violence and because a recent case of hers involved a victim around the same age as Charley.
When Madeline arrives at the school, she finds very few students and a skeleton crew working at the secluded campus over holiday break. Madeline interviews the four students who are present over break and as she works to gain their trust, Madeline seems to be suffering with anxiety of her own.
Meanwhile, interview transcripts with names and identifying information redacted are interspersed between the evolving mystery. The interview is from a year ago, and details a woman sharing the story of her affair and the consequences of it on her family to a neutral interviewer.
What happened to Charley?
We find out Charley was murdered by Violet, another student at the school and the daughter of the new headmistress Emilia. Violet was angry at her mother for taking this job and moving Violet to the girls’ school after Violet got pregnant. In a twist, the older man Violet was seeing is Blake, a current employee at the school. Emilia didn’t know Blake was the man Violet was seeing when she hired him, and Violet made sure he got the job. Violet was in the library having an intimate encounter with Blake when Charley walked in on them and threatened to tell Violet’s mother. Violet couldn’t allow Charley to ruin her relationship, so she killed her and rolled her body down the ravine.
Emilia saw Violet murder Charley on the video feed and helped cover it up. She claimed the video cameras were disabled to hide the fact that there was evidence of the crime. Violet changed out the pills in Madeline’s bottle causing her mental health to spiral. Meanwhile Blake took Alice, another student who knew, and held her hostage. Madeline tries to run with Alice but Blake catches them and his son Jeremy hits him with a shovel to stop him. Blake dies and Violet confesses.
In a final twist, Matt (the PI) reveals that the autopsy report showed Charley actually died of hypothermia, not the blow to her head. Charley could have been saved if Violet hadn’t pushed her down the ravine.
What was the deal with the redacted interviews?
The redacted interviews tell the story of a woman who suspected her husband of cheating on her with a client of his, Lynn, and began an affair of her own. One day she is with her lover when her husband calls and informs her of his cancer diagnosis. She feels terrible and tries to end the affair and spend time with her teenage daughter and husband during his treatment. One day her lover shows up to the house trying to talk to her since she cut him off, and her daughter sees. While she doesn’t tell her father, she no longer wants to talk to her mother.
One night the woman is awoken by noises and when she goes downstairs, she finds out her lover has murdered her husband and daughter. She picks up a metal baseball bat and kills her lover. This happened a year prior to the events of the novel, and the interviews are the woman telling her story to Dr. Madeline Pine, her psychiatrist and an expert in female violence and criminal behavior. Dr. Pine is working to help the woman see that she acted in self-defense, and that she is not at fault for what her lover did to her family.
How did it end?
In a twist, we learn that the woman we know as Dr. Madeline Pine and who has been helping with Charley’s case is not the real Madeline. The woman pretending to be Madeline Pine is actually the patient of Madeline’s from the interviews. She details the story of her husband’s affair, followed by hers, and eventually their murder. She also describes her subsequent actions to kill the man she had an affair with who murdered her family.
As Madeline is counseling her, she accidentally reveals something telling—Madeline was the “Lynn” who her husband was having an affair with. She wanted to interview the wife to try to help her and as well as to process her own grief over losing her lover. In a fit of rage, the woman (who we learn is called Mrs. Strumm) snaps Madeline’s neck and takes her bag with her when she leaves. When Matt (the PI) calls, she pretends to be Madeline and agrees to go help with the case. At the end of the book, the police call to let her know Madeline Pine was murdered. Mrs. Strumm has presumably has gotten away with murdering Dr. Pine and taking over her life.
What did I think?
The beginning of The Night it Ended was slow and took me awhile to get into. It’s rough being in the mind of a character who is mentally unwell, and that is what we see with Madeline. Eventually we realize that she was being drugged, and she is more clear-headed than we realized. The story with the student and the murder was interesting, but not what made this book deliciously good. That was a standard thriller plot.
The unique part to this book was the reveal that the patient in the interviews is who we have thought was Dr. Madeline Pine all along. Garner sets it up expertly to make the reader suspect that either the real Dr. Pine was the victim (that gets debunked eventually), or that it is a case of hers that will link to the murder at the boarding school. In reality, Dr. Pine was already murdered before the book began and we have been reading about Mrs. Strumm taking over her life. Wild!
I enjoy when an author lets a bad guy succeed at the end. I don’t want every book to be that way, but sometimes it keeps us on our toes because we typically expect good to prevail. In this case, we learn that Mrs. Strumm seems to have successfully gotten away with replacing Dr. Madeline Pine. Unexpected and dark! Even more terrifying is that this murderer may now go on to see patients with Dr. Pine’s license… Yikes!
Usually I pick up on two names being linked (see Everyone is Watching for my thoughts on that!), but for some reason I was totally blindsided in this book at the reveal that Dr. Madeline Pine was “Lynn”, the woman Mrs. Strumm’s husband was having an affair with. I think this reveal worked well because to figure it out, we would have to make connections between the characters and timeline that were still hidden from us. Looking back, everything clicked into place perfectly. The Night it Ended was far-fetched, but in a fun way! Twisted, surprising, and fun at the end–this made a slower first half worth it for me.
