The Twilight Hour
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
London, 1947: it's freezing winter in the shabby, bomb-damaged city. Young socialite Dinah Wentworth, a bright, innocent newcomer to the Fitzrovia scene, becomes embroiled in a dark scandal when she discovers the corpse of surrealist artist Titus Mavor. Not wanting to explain her reasons for being at Mavor's flat that evening, she decides against reporting her grim discovery to the police.
But her silence has terrible consequences. Dinah's husband's friend, Colin Harris, is linked to the crime and arrested on suspicion of murder. Dinah realises someone is trying to frame him and knows she must uncover the real villain before Harris is hanged.
Set against the background of the Cold War, post-war shortages, and the struggling British film industry, Elizabeth Wilson's elegant noir vividly evokes the fashions and politics of a bohemian community flourishing in defiance of austerity. The Twilight Hour is a riveting thriller with a corkscrew twist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British commentator Wilson (The Lost Time Cafe), whose nonfiction focus is feminism and popular culture, does little with her intriguing choice of period in this unremarkable historical whodunit. 1947 London is beset both by a record-breaking freeze and by the country's bumpy return to normalcy after the traumas of WWII. Against this background, Wilson has placed a young and callow heroine, Dinah Wentworth, a newly-married socialite whose na vete (and penchant for exclamation points) will grate on some readers. Wentworth's dull existence is brightened when her filmmaker husband, Alan, falls in with a mysterious Romanian film director, Radu Enescu, and his leading lady, Gwendolen Grey, who want to use him to write the screenplay for a romantic feature film. After Dinah stumbles across a corpse, she panics and doesn't notify the authorities, leading to predictable complications. An unsurprising solution to the murder and unconvincing period detail leaves readers as cold as the London winter.
