Review of The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke

The combined effort of V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke is a locked-room mystery that's a takedown of the book publishing industry, with authors vying to finish a bestselling series in one weekend and earn immense riches at any cost. It was fun, but I was hoping for more intrigue and twists from this dual-author powerhouse team.

Six authors, many who are strangers to each other, and each one part of the dreaded publishing "midlist"--they've never made it big enough for stardom--are invited to the private Scottish island and castle where the reclusive Arthur Fletch, bestselling mystery author, sometimes hosts salons.

But when they arrive, they find that Fletch, who had been working on a new mystery, is dead. And the book remains unfinished.

But Fletch's former editor serves up an opportunity: Whichever one of the invited authors writes the best ending will receive the remainder of Fletch's advance--and a multiple-book deal of their own.

But they only have 72 hours to write well enough to fight for the money and recognition they're each desperate to gain. Their electronics will all be locked up, so that news of Fletch's death won't get out, and so they'll concentrate on the task at hand. But that means they'll have no contact with the outside world if something goes wrong. And not everyone on the island is who they say they are.

In darkly playful Agatha Christie style, they're in a locked-room (well, -castle) mystery, and it seems that one of them is trying to pick off the others in a cutthroat bid to be the last one standing.

I wanted to know a little bit more about Fletch, his long-running series, and his main protagonist, Julia Petrarch, and I was hoping for (but didn't find) some echoes between that book and the mysterious situation at hand.

I liked understanding each author's reason for writing, and we get snippets of their pasts to set up their path to becoming authors. The specific, ongoing, cutting takedown of the publishing industry seems to be built on real-life experiences, and the plot pits authors against each other, forces most of them to write in a genre not their own, and motivates each writer with greed: a reward of more money than most authors would see in a lifetime.

Sadly, we don't get the satisfaction of knowing the imagined endings each of the authors develops in their a-ha moments. The eventual ending to Fletch's book is an interesting choice, and for me, somewhat disappointing, but in another case, a meta story-within-the-same-story structure felt like an entertaining hiding-in-plain-sight trick.

The killer is, ultimately, also hiding in plain sight, and a few loose ends are resolved. I felt and hoped that we were being set up for a delightful twist, but no shocking revelation or additional information emerged in the end to add to the intrigue or depth.

I listened to The Ending Writes Itself as an audiobook.

More from V. E. Schwab

Evelyn Clarke is the pen name for the writing team V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke.

You can find my Bossy reviews of many other V. E. Schwab books here.