The Night in Question is book 2 of young adult series, The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.
That underneath all her cattiness, the bragging she would do about stupid Hollywood events she wormed her way into, her obsession with being an actress, she had a decent heart.
While snooping around the castle where the school dance is being held, Alice Ogilvie stumbles across one of her classmates, Rebecca Kennedy, lying in a pool of blood with another, Helen Park, standing over her holding a bloody knife. The clumsy coppers think it’s an open and shut case, but Alice and her friend Iris believe there’s more to the incident that first impressions.
“This is so Agatha Christie: a secret passage, a hidden staircase, sneaking around in the dark with a storm raging outside. A shiver of pleasure runs through me.”
The ghost of Agatha Christie is sprinkled through The Night in Question as the story unfolds from the perspectives of misfit friends and polar opposites, Iris and Alice. Using their expert mystery solving skills learnt mainly from reading Christie novels, they realise the incident may be connected to events that took place in the castle in the 1940s. They set out to solve the puzzle and save Helen Park.
“They’re a little flashy. I think I remember my parents kind of joking about them at some point, like they can buy whatever they want, but the one thing they can’t is respect.”
YA can be just as brutal as adult fiction and The Night in Question does not shy away from topics such as domestic violence, class, corruption, betrayal, mental illness, and of course teenage friendship and family dramas. The Night in Question is a well plotted, fast paced, entertaining YA read.
R L Smith 