End of Story: A Novel of Suspense

by Peter Abrahams

Book Overview

Ivy Seidel dreams of becoming a writer, a great American novelist. But running low on money and concerned that her writing might lack a depth and darkness, she takes a job teaching creative writing --... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060726652
• ISBN13: 9780060726652
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Becoming My Favorite Author

Peter Abrahams is becoming my favorite author. This is the second book of his I have read (the first being,Oblivion ) and it is really hard to put down. Whenever you sit and wonder why on earth women fall in love with conflicts, you can think about this story and, on some small level, understand. This (like Oblivion) is a smart, sexy thriller that keeps you on the edge of the seat.

I'm shocked by some of the bad reviews of this book

I'll admit this book starts out slowly and perhaps some people didn't "get it" because it isn't just a suspense tale. The title hints at the deeper layers: "End of Story: A Novel of Suspense". This book is as much about writing and the process of creating a story as it is about the actual story - although I happen to think the story itself is plenty suspenseful - and believable. Where does truth and fiction intersect? How do our lives affect our writing and how do other people change our story, even as we're writing it? These are just a few of the questions raised by this book. Basic plot? A writer is offered a job teaching a writing workshop for inmates at a local jail. One of her students is an amazingly good writer and WHAT he writes leads her to question whether he is truly guilty or not. She can't stop thinking about what he wrote and becomes determined to discover what is "truth" and what is "fiction". In the process, she begins to create her own story and her life becomes part of that story until the reader reaches the "end of story". I found it all to be clever and I couldn't put it down. I'll admit this may be because I love writing and thinking about stories and various plots. But I also got totally hooked by this book and its plot - and I'm surprised more people here (at least, those who wrote a review here) did not.

Unexpected.

This is a real page turner. By page ten I had lost myself in Ivy's world. At page 200, my heart was pounding. By the end of the story, I was exhasuted. It's just that good. The book is filled with twists and turns that I could not have anticipated. Just as I had an "aha" moment and thought I had everything figured out, it would crumble. There is nothing predictable in this work. It is truly a work of suspense. Elegantly written, beautifully plotted. I give End of Story my highest recommendation.

A Stephen King blurb is money . . .

Ordinarily I'm pretty cynical about blurbs, but when Stephen King recommends an author, I'm all ears. I think he actually reads the books he recommends; he's never let me down yet. Peter Abrahams is a suspense novelist, but he spends more time developing his lead character than most. Ivy Seidel is a very compelling character. She's an MFA graduate working as a bartender. When her friend sells a screen play to Hollywood, she agrees to take over his creative writing class at Dannemora. She promptly falls for one of her students, Vance Harrow, who seems to have more talent than she does. A subplot deals with a story Ivy is trying to sell to THE NEW YORKER, entitled "Cave Man." Abrahams makes this jell when we're introduced to her caveman class. They include gang members and thugs who also seem to have a lot of innate talent, but they're incredibly violent. One of her students is a white collar criminal named Felix Balaban who has incited the wrath of Luis Morales, a gang member who feels Felix has disrespected him. When Ivy investigates Harrow's background she discovers he was involved in a Casino robbery, but she's convinced he's innocent. She sets out to prove it. I'm usually a slow reader, but I read this story in a couple of days. However, it has a couple of drawbacks. For one thing, the police officers who help Ivy investigate Harrow's background go way out of their way to help her. She's a fiction writer, not an investigative reporter. And she's never published anything. Certainly she's attractive, but that's not enough motivation. There's also a scene where she needs an extension ladder. The ladder reaches all the way to the third floor of a hospital. She drives a little Saab upon the roof of which she ties the ladder. She also crawls up that ladder like a Chinese acrobat, all the way to the last couple of rungs. But those are just minor quibbles; what really got my hackles up was the ironic ending. Arahams settles for clever rather than appropriateness. I was all set to give this book five stars until I ran up against that disappointing ending, but that won't stop me from ordering another Abrahams suspense novel; he's written fourteen others, including OBLIVION, THEIR WILDEST DREAMS, and THE TUTOR.

Ivy League

Ivy Seidel, an aspiring New York writer, works as a waitress in a New York bar while trying to make ends meet and maintain her precarious position on the lower slopes of MFA Olympus. When a friend gets lucky and takes off for Hollywood, Ivy inherits his gig of teaching writing to prisoners at Dannemora, a facility way upstate that bewitches her with its scent of raw masculinity. The men she meets in jail make all other men seem like wimps. One in particular catches her eye, a charismatic and gentle giant called Vance Harrow. While in Manhattan she tries to resist the advances of a slick investment banker, Danny Weinberg who, as it turns out, has an acquaintance who works for The New Yorker, and who tries to help her place a story "Caveman," in the journal's august pages, figuring if she made it there, her career would be a sure thing. Ivy is a fascinating creature, beautiful as Carole Lombard, but withdrawn and introverted, with a lingering doubt about her own skills as a writer that leave her vulnerable to--well, love I suppose. I don't know if Abrahams is 100 per cent comfortable with writing about the low lives he has to animate when it comes time for Ivy to investigate Harrow's supposed crime in the casino. The people of the dead-end Spoon River town whom she meets seem variously undeveloped, idealistically "honest," or brain-dead. However that doesn't mean I didn't want to read about them, just noticing that for Abrahams, the middle class has more secrets to uncover. The working class has had all the mystery poumnded out of them by the cruelties of birth. I don't know how Peter Abrahams does it, but he has me racing from page to page like a gazelle leaping from peak to peak in the Andes. He seems to know everything about setting the scene and about setting a match to a trail of narrative gasoline. Whoosh! In a minute the story catches fire and never lets go until its last fatal love chase. You never get the same book twice with Abrahams, and while some of his books are dearer to me than others, all are winners. You just can't go wrong when you're in his hands.