When a small bone at the centre of a famous sculpture is revealed to be human, three people become intimately connected by the secrets and lies that put it there.

Set on a Scottish tidal island connected to the mainland for just a few hours each day, and home to only one inhabitant, The Blue Hour asks questions of ambition, power, art and perception.

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Paula Hawkin’s singular fourth thriller cements her place among the very best of our most nuanced, powerful and stylish storytellers.

My Review

What a cast of mostly unlikable characters! First of all we have James Becker (actually he’s quite nice), highly intelligent, working class, a self made man with a PhD. Curator at Fairburn House, but totally paranoid about his pregnant wife Helena, who was previously engaged to Sebastian Lennox, heir to Fairburn when his mother dies. James is also obsessed with the late Victoria Chapman, the artist whose work was bequeathed to the Fairburn gallery. It’s one of her works – a sculpture called Division II – that starts the whole investigation, when one of the bones used is believed to be human.

Vanessa was extremely talented, but highly strung and vicious when she wanted to be. She lived on an island in the Scottish Highlands, where she could paint and create her ceramics. One day she breaks her wrist in a fall and that’s when she meets Dr Grace Haswell.

Grace, I initially thought was on the spectrum, obsessive and socially awkward, but then I began to think it was something far more sinister than that. She can’t help being short, fat and ugly (not my description), but she is obsessed with Vanessa in a rather unhealthy way. And anyone else who deserts her.

Vanessa’s husband Julian is tall, blond and handsome. Grace hates him. He’s also unfaithful, scheming, greedy and unreliable. However, Vanessa wasn’t averse to the odd affair herself, including with her gallerist, Douglas Lennox, who she slept with when she felt like it. Before he was accidentally shot that is.

But worst of all we have Lady Emmeline, wife of the late Douglas and mother of Sebastian. Now I know she had every reason to hate Vanessa, calls her a whore etc, but she also hates Becker, partly because he stole her son’s fiance, but also because he’s working class and not fit to move in their upper class society. She actually asks him about his mother who died when James was a child – ‘And was she also a whore?’ And on one occasion, she does something so awful (I won’t say what), and when the child witnessing it won’t stop crying, she says ‘anyone would think I shot her mother’.

The Blue Hour is a story of art, obsession, isolation, murder and greed. It’s brilliant. I read it in two sittings.

Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours

About the Author

PAULA HAWKINS worked as a journalist for fifteen years before writing her first novel. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, she moved to London in 1989. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide. Published in over fifty languages, it has been a No.1 bestseller around the world and was a box-office-hit film starring Emily Blunt. Paula’s thrillers Into the Water and A Slow Fire Burning were also instant No.1 bestsellers.