The Blue Hour
A Novel
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3.5 • 170 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
"The best Paula Hawkins yet – by a tense and haunting mile." – Lee Child
"An atmospheric, stylish puzzle box of a thriller... truly exceptional." – Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods
"A masterful exploration of the nature of obsession...I loved it." – Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek
The propulsive and powerful new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day.
Once home to Vanessa: A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago.
Now home to Grace: A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation.
But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.
And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge....
A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, The Blue Hour recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.
"Atmospheric and marvelously twisty." – Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution
“Reminiscent of du Maurier: art, islands, missing spouses ... Hard to put down.” – Mick Herron
"A masterpiece! Gorgeous and chilling." – Shari Lapena
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The best-selling author of The Girl on the Train is back with a powerfully atmospheric psychological thriller about friendship and betrayal. Vanessa Chapman was a well-respected artist with a volatile love life who lived and worked on a small island in Scotland. Two decades after her death, a shocking discovery is made in one of her creations—a sculpture includes a fragment of bone that may be human. As investigators try to separate truth from speculation, captivating new suspicions about the disappearance of Vanessa’s unfaithful husband, as well as the relationship between her and her friend and self-appointed caretaker, Grace, come to light. Paula Hawkins has filled The Blue Hour with a rogues’ gallery of untrustworthy characters with messy relationships and unscrupulous motives, all set against the atmospheric backdrop of a remote Scottish community. We savored every tense, uncertain page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This predictable offering from bestseller Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) centers on an enigmatic artist, her socially awkward companion, and a lifelong fan of her work. In the present, a Tate Modern retrospective of late painter Vanessa Chapman is cut short when a forensics expert notices that an apparent animal bone in one of her sculptures is actually a human rib bone. James Becker, an employee at the foundation that manages her estate, tries to settle the matter by heading to Eris Island, where Chapman lived for the last decade of her life, and interviewing her companion there, Grace Haswell. Hanging in the air is the 20-year-old disappearance of Vanessa's husband, Julian, whose body was never found; rumors swirl in the press that the rib bone may have belonged to him. As James and Grace bond over their love for Vanessa, flashbacks illuminate Julian's fate and the precise nature of Vanessa and Grace's relationship. Hawkins manages few surprises and fewer insights into her characters, resulting in a narrative that's curiously uninvolving even as her skills as a stylist are on full display. This fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Customer Reviews
Predictable
A bit predictable and I did not like the ending.
Didn’t love
Never really got into the story
Yuk
Just disturbing. Not a good mystery. Gross