Christian White is a master of the crime twist, so much so that now I go looking for the twist or reveal as soon as I begin a new White book. Despite this, he still manages to surprise me with the complicated layers of deception and secrets that are hiding in plain sight. THE LONG NIGHT (Affirm Press 2025) is an engrossing story of one night, from 7pm until dawn, told between the perspectives of two women who share a trauma and connection that will need all their courage to outrun the darkness of this one long night, survive all it entails, and find resolution.
We begin with Em, a quiet girl waiting in a bar to meet up with another girl on a blind date. She is sure she has been stood up which only exaggerates her already high anxiety about herself, her identity and her place in the world. When she is kidnapped later that night by a masked man, she is immersed in a frightening trap.
The second woman, Jodie, has had her own share of trauma and troubles, and has thrown herself into her artistic work to try to forget. But when her daughter is kidnapped, and the perpetrators make cruel and unusual demands, Jodie is drawn right back into a world she’d rather not remember.
Both women race through the darkness of this one long night, each hoping to survive, each dreading the memories of tragedy the new situation ignites. The narrative is tense, pacy, viscerally gruesome but also punctuated with touches of genuine warmth and tenderness. As with all of White’s novels, when each twist is revealed, it makes the reader want to return to the beginning and spot all the clues they missed during the first read. Clever and intriguing, THE LONG NIGHT has a message about child welfare and both the families we are born into and the families we create. It’s about the long tail of childhood trauma and how it affects us into adulthood. With many a misdirection and the occasional flash of humour, this is a very satisfying crime read.