The Night in Question by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson

Title: The Night in Question

Author: Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson

Genre: Crime

Publisher: HarperCollins Australia

Published: 7^th June 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 416

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: How do you solve a murder? Follow the lessons of the master – Agatha Christie! Iris and Alice find themselves in the middle of another Castle Cove mystery in the sequel to New York Times bestseller The Agathas, by powerhouse authors Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.

Alice Ogilvie and Iris Adams became the talk of Castle Cove when they cracked the biggest case of the fall: the death of Brooke Donovan. Together, the Agathas put Brooke’s killer away for good, and since then things around town have been almost back to normal. Quiet, even.

But if Alice and Iris know anything, it’s that sometimes quiet is just the calm before the storm. The truth is, Brooke’s disappearance wasn’t the first mystery to rock Castle Cove, and it won’t be the last. So when their school dance at the infamous Levy Castle – the site of film starlet Mona Moody’s unsolved death back in the 1940s – is interrupted by a violent assault, Iris and Alice pull out their murder boards and get back to work.

To understand the present, sometimes you need to look into the past. And if the Agathas want a chance at solving their new case, that’s exactly where they’ll need to start digging. Only, what they uncover might very well kill them.

~*~

A few months after the events of the Agathas and Brooke Donovan’s murder, Alice Ogilvie and Iris Adams are at Levy Castle with the rest of the school for a Sadie Hawkins dance when not only does a storm hit, trapping them all at the castle until they can get out, but another one of Alice’s ex-friends is attacked. Alice finds another ex-friend, Helen Park, standing over Rebecca Kennedy in a secret room in the castle. And when the Castle Cove police have decided that it is an open and shut case, Alice and Iris know there is more to the case than meets the eye, and use their school genealogy project as an excuse to poke through the history of Castle Cove, the Levy family and Mona Moody – but will they find out more than they bargained for, and who is really behind the attack?

The Night in Question ups the stakes and danger from the first book, with the added tension of Iris’s mother wanting to keep her away from Alice, as well as Alice’s parents taking an interest in what she’s doing – when they’ve spent most of the time away from home, leaving her in the care of her nanny, Brenda. This unlikely friendship forged between the girls based on a love of Agatha Christie has formed the basis of the teen detective’s series, where the teen investigators work on solving the case, using different angles and techniques to get the information they need – with many obstacles along the way of course, which makes the novel interesting as it ensures nothing is easy for anyone in the novel.

When I first started this book, I thought the whole book would be a closed room mystery – where everyone is stuck in the same room or place for the entirety of the novel. This trope has been used but in a smaller way – at the beginning of the novel, whilst expanding the investigative space that the characters use to solve the case and find out what happened to Rebecca. As Iris and Alice dig deeper, it becomes clear that there is something mysterious going on with some of the people who were at the dance and who they go to school with. They must grapple with this as well as their respective home lives – Iris and her mother, who are still dealing with the fallout of domestic violence, and Alice, whose absentee parents are starting to push for her to do better in school and are suddenly making time to be around. This all adds to the conflict within the novel. The balance between the wider world of what Alice and Iris are investigating and their home lives is done well and manages to show the stark differences in their lives, and what happens when someone judges another person – when assumptions are made to try and drive a wedge between the characters. This is a little bit darker than the first book, but still uses all the mystery tropes we know really well, so it feels like you are reading something written by Agatha Christie but with a contemporary twist that is relatable for teen readers. They can get the best of both worlds – an intriguing mystery where the characters use a combination of old-fashioned investigative techniques and modern technology, with characters they can connect with and the issues they may deal with in their lives in a modern world that we are all part of.

I am a big fan of Alice, Iris, and their friends who help with the investigations – and I feel like Alice fits in with Iris, Raf, Spike, Neil, and Zora better than her former friends, who always seem to be involved in the case somehow – usually as the victim. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next in the small community of Castle Cove, and what other cases Iris and Alice investigate – I feel like there is something more to the case in this book, based on the ending, so I am wondering if we will get answers to what happened there as well. Though the ending did work well for the story and genre, and I think whether the conclusion is left as it is or comes back later on, it is still a very good story and addition to this series.

Another great crime book aimed at teens, but that I think will be enjoyed by many.