The Night Shift by Gemma Rogers
Genre: Psychological thriller
Read: 5th March 2025
Published: 6th March 2025
★★★ 3 stars
DESCRIPTION:
How can one 12-hour night shift be so deadly?
I loved the anonymity, flexibility and solitude that working the night shift at Storage Queen gave me.
The unsociable hours paid well, helping me fund my university degree and giving me a quiet place to study while the world slept peacefully in their warm, cozy beds. It was the perfect job for me.
But that Friday night proved to be more than I bargained for when a man walked through the door, dragging a large suitcase.
My immediate instincts told me something was wrong.
That’s when my ordeal began.
I just had to make it through the night shift.
A pacy, heart stopping, page turning thriller for the fans of Shari Lapena and Lisa Jewell.
MY THOUGHTS:
Just twelve hours to survive...
Hot on the heels of "The Honeymoon" (which is phenomenal, by the way), I dived into this latest offering by Gemma Rogers whose thrillers have always kept me turning the pages in anticipation. And while this one started off as a slow build with not much happening in the first hour or so of Nina's night shift, it certainly picked up pace into the almost ridiculous with a relatively unrealistic game of cat and mouse. I'm not sure how Nina managed to survive under the circumstances when she really should have been dead within the first few minutes. Especially considering some of her poor choices, not to mention the diabetes.
Nina is a uni student in her second year of medical school, her dream to become a doctor and treat others with the often times debilitating diabetes. So when boyfriend Dom tries pleading with her to drop everything and spend six months bumming around travelling, first stop Thailand, she doesn't even consider it. Becoming a doctor is her dream and no way was she jeaopardising it when she was so close to fulfilling her dream. So the couple had a major bust up just moments before Nina was due to start her shift at Storage Queen (funnily enough, we have a Storage King here), thus making her late for her shift.
As manager Stacey bids her a hasty farewell, Nina is looking forward to a quiet stress-free night shift. Until it isn't. When the facility is plunged into darkness, Nina suddenly finds herself in a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an assailant she cannot see. But she knows this place. She just needs to navigate it stealthily and silently without her pursuer knowing so that she can make her escape and alert authorities as to her discovery. You'd think so, right? Wrong.
Nina makes every stupid decision known to man. Instead of making her escape, she leads him on a merry chase up and down, round and round, whilst never getting very far in the process. I threw my hands up in the air in frustration several times, shaking my head and rolling my eyes. The whole concept was a neverending cycle that even exhausted me by the end.
But there were some aspects of the story that I found totally unbelievable. The security guard, for example. No way could he just disappear without anyone noticing or following it up. He'd have to log every call and every action and response to every call out so that someone would always be aware of where he was should anything go wrong. In reality, his disappearing off the radar with his company should have had them sending someone out to his last call out to investigate. My husband was in security in another life, so I questioned this with him, to which he confirmed my suspicions. And he also worked night shifts though they were never this exciting. But that was just one thing. There are many others which, if I mentioned, would spoil the story and I don't want to do that.
However, I found this one to be rather unrealistic and bordering on ridiculous to the point that Nina irritated me. I couldn't care less what happened to her, she made that many stupid decisions. She made it very difficult to empathise with her and her plight and I'm still dizzy from all the up and down, to-ing and fro-ing she took us on.
The pacing was steady throughout (though I was kept dizzy with all the running about) and while she mostly made stupid decisions, there were a few heroic ones I could cheer her for. Her insulin pen, for one. Ingenious. And despite battling hypoglycaemic attacks, she managed to maintain some level of focus which was to be commended.
Overall, an OK thriller. For 258 pages, it felt a little longer to me but that could be because Nina irritated the crap out of me and I kept wanting to slap her. There were a couple of good twists that I didn't see coming...probably because I was too focused on Nina's stupidity. But they kept the story tight and made it a little worthwhile. And while I don't mind tales that border the unrealistic or OTT, I do like them to entertain me not irritate me. And Nina irritated me more often than not.
I would like to thank #GemmaRogers, #Netgalley, #BoldwoodBooks and #RachelsRandomResources for an ARC of #TheNightShift in exchange for an honest review.
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