“Yes: readers would remember; readers would dare. The Crooked Man stormed bestseller lists worldwide. Reviewers praised it, some extravagantly. Sebastian Trapp, at long, long last, was back.” After a 10-year absence from novelizing, the main character in A. J. Finn’s new novel, End of Story, had returned to the typewriter and triumphed, though one could be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like Finn giving himself a pep talk about his own reappearance after six years.
And why would readers have to “dare” to read it? A year after the extraordinary success of Finn’s debut psychological thriller, The Woman in the Window, Daniel Mallory (Finn’s real name) was the subject of a lethal takedown by Ian Parker in The New Yorker, in which Mallory, who worked in publishing, is portrayed as a creative and compulsive liar, misleading professors, colleagues, and employers about his work history and education (he did not have a doctorate from Oxford); faking a bout or two with cancer; claiming that his mother and brother had died from cancer and suicide, respectively; alienating colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic with his strange behavior; and borrowing elements of the book’s plot from the 1995 movie Copycat. Among other things.
