Review: "Return to Midnight" by Emma Dues

Return to Midnight by Emma Dues
Published August 2024 via Thomas & Mercer
★★★

Almost ten years ago, Margot was a senior in college, living her best life in a big old house with all her closest friends. And almost ten years ago, Margot survived a massacre in that house in which almost all of those friends were killed. A suspect was caught and convicted, and Margot has tried to move on…though mostly that means barely sleeping, barely eating, and barely leaving her mother’s house. Now, as part of the process of writing a book about that massacre, she’s returning to the house she lived in in college for the first time since the massacre. And things aren’t all as they seem…

I couldn’t tell you why, but I’m a sucker for final-girl-revisits-the-scene books. In this case, the cover drew me in (though ballet turns out to be a minor part of the book), but I would have been interested based on the description anyway. Massacres and final girls and old Victorian houses? Yes please.

The result is mixed. I finished the book late at night, and the end gave me some heart-pounding moments, which I appreciated. The dance element is also nice, in places: Margot and her friends were mostly dance minors at university, meaning that they had skill and interest but generally weren’t planning to make careers out of dance. As a rule, they’re as interested in partying and drinking and carb-based food as they are in putting in practice and perfecting pirouettes. This isn’t a side of dance that I see reflected often in fiction—I’m much more likely to see books in which the characters are desperate make it into a professional company, when in reality the experience Margot and her friends have is much more common. (And: I don’t know if this was intentional, but…shades of I Know What You Did Last Summer?)

But I don’t love the voice (first person POV doesn’t help, I think), and Margot’s pretty inconsistent: she goes straight from a reclusive, terrified life to staying at the scene of the crime, telling her secrets to what sounds like a tabloid reporter (bad move for a number of reasons, not least that she’s writing a book about it and should think carefully about what she wants other people to be able to publish before she can), and running around town accusing people of stalking and/or murder. I think I’d have found her more believable if she had been able to move on more in the past nine years, or if she were less willing to throw herself back into it. Meanwhile, as we learn more about the side characters, they tend to get less appealing rather than more.

And…I’m not sure how best to say this, but lord have mercy, Margot is dumb as a box of rocks. Absolutely zero sense of self-preservation: in addition to trusting a stranger she knows nothing about (and inviting him over, and falling asleep while he’s there, and giving him free rein in the house), she contaminates evidence, doesn’t think to contact the police about that evidence or about stalking, routinely confronts people she suspects of violence, goes down into the basement without any sort of backup every time she hears a noise there…so many chances for her to end up even more traumatized, to say nothing of very dead.

Finally, this is a book in which a large amount of the plot hinges on Margot not being honest with the reader. There are some major gaps in her knowledge about what happened—we don’t get her memory of the murders until late in the book, but it could have opened the book without significant spoilers—but about other things she is very, very coy with the reader. I understand why it’s done, but it’s not something I much enjoy in thrillers; I like to be on the same page as the narrator (and, you know, to be afraid they’re going to die). For readers who don’t mind this withholding of information, this won’t be a problem, but…mileage may vary.

So—points for premise and the interesting use of ballet, but the characters are hard to connect with and overall it ended being not what I was hoping for from a thriller.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.