That Night by Gillian McAllister is a psychological thriller about three adult siblings whose vacation in Verona takes a horrifying turn. When Frannie calls her siblings, Joe and Cathy, in the middle of the night and tells them she’s killed a man, they make a choice that binds them together in a secret that will slowly unravel their lives: they help conceal the death. Once they return home to England, the lies begin multiplying, the police investigation takes off, and the siblings start questioning how well they actually know one another. A deliciously stressful premise that turns familial devotion into its own kind of trap.
It was an accident. A terrible coincidence. This is the hand they’ve been dealt, and now they need to play the cards.
Gillian McAllister, That Night
I am such a fan of Gillian McAllister’s thrillers! She is exceptionally good at sustaining suspense even after revealing the crime at the center of the story. I’m usually pretty good at predicting twists in the thrillers I read, and here, I occasionally suspected what might happen, but I could never quite figure out why things were happening. Every new piece of information altered the logic behind what I thought I understood, which kept me turning pages because I just had to see how the full picture would eventually take shape. The tension in this book comes as much from waiting for the family to fracture as it does from wondering whether the police will uncover what they’ve done.
The premise also creates a fascinating moral thought experiment. Joe and Cathy make an arguably appalling decision to help Frannie hide a body, but McAllister carefully establishes the emotional reasoning that makes it feel like the only rational choice in the moment. It leads to the core question that this story dismantles: How far would you go to protect your sibling? At what point does loyalty become complicity, and can you recognize that line before you’ve already crossed it? Anyone with siblings, or even a friendship close enough to feel like family, will probably find themselves considering what they would do in the same situation. It’s what makes this plot so utterly relatable and horrific and thrilling!
The beginning of the crime doesn’t matter, because of the ones they have committed along the way, like a train that just goes all night, on a loop, with no end or beginning, so nobody remembers where it came from.
Gillian McAllister, That Night
Most of the novel unfolds in the past, right after the crime has happened, while chapters from an unidentified perspective in the future appear sporadically throughout the story. Initially, we don’t know who is speaking or what has happened in the intervening time, and I had so much fun trying to identify the narrator and determine what these glimpses were telling us about the ultimate consequences of that fateful night. I love how this structure adds yet another mystery to the plot without distracting from the tension already building in the main timeline.
The siblings themselves are deeply flawed and frustrating, but their almost claustrophobic closeness is one of the novel’s most compelling elements. A childhood trauma has shaped them into a unit that can feel impenetrable to everyone outside it, including their partners, but as guilt, suspicion, and resentment begin exposing the cracks in their relationship, That Night becomes more than a story about whether they will get caught. It’s also an unsettling exploration of what unquestioning loyalty can cost, and whether a family can survive the things its members do in the name of protecting it.
Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
