A depressing book.

"Makes me angry still. To have a place tainted like that... It's another violation on top of the original one. It happens all the time - you go walking somewhere, or swimming or running - whatever it is, your thing, the thing you enjoy - you go to a place, and it's beautiful and unspoiled, and you are doing that thing you love, and then someone - not always a man, I suppose, but usually a man - comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better."

I struggled with this one. The mystery kept me interested, but I was disappointed in a lot of it, especially the ending. I also had a hard time with the relationships between the characters. I personally didn't find any of them believable.

    While there were certainly mysteries! One was pretty easy to figure out, but the rest I didn't see coming.

  Wow, did I HATE that ending, however! I mean what happened?! It's like a cliffhanger, but there's no sequel. I dislike it when books have an ambiguous ending. 

   The characters were also highly unlikable, I couldn't even find one of them likable. I understand characters having flaws, but none of them seemed to be decent people.

   Overall, the book was meh and would have been so much better if at least some of the characters were likable.

   The narrator did an excellent job, just not as talented as others I've heard. 

I really like Paula Hawkins and, while this isn’t my favourite of her books, she does a great job exploring themes of loneliness, love and caregiving that almost creep up on you as you read. And even when I figured out the who in the whodunnit part of the book, these themes and ideas made me want to keep reading and delve more into the characters. 

Okay, confession time: I was one of the few people who apparently just couldn’t get on with The Girl on the Train. Paula Hawkins’ phenomenally successful debut arguably changed the publishing landscape, leading to a slew of ‘girl’ novels centred around unreliable female protagonists and propelling psychological domestic thrillers to the top of the bestseller charts. But, try as I might to get with the programme, I just couldn’t gel with it and, as a result, haven’t picked up one of Hawkins’s works since.

On the basis of The Blue Hour this was a grave error on my part because this latest novel, Hawkins’s fourth was absolute Shelf-catnip! Set on Eris, a tidal island just off the coast of Scotland, The Blue Hour focuses upon the legacies left by the late Vanessa Chapman: artist, recluse, eccentric, destroyer of other people’s marriages, and all-round ‘difficult’ woman. When a small bone at the centre of one of Vanessa’s most famous sculptures is revealed to be human, James Becker is dispatched to Eris to find out if Grace, Vanessa’s long-time companion and carer, can shed any light upon how the artist came by the materials for the piece.

Becker is the curator of the Fairburn Foundation. Gifted Vanessa’s artworks upon her death, the Foundation has its own complicated history with the artist. Its founder, Douglas Lennox, was one of Vanessa’s many lovers and his widow, Emmeline resents Becker’s interest in the artist and her work: a relationship not helped by the fact that Becker’s wife Helena was once engaged to Emmeline’s son.

As Becker begins to draw Grace out of her isolation and discover more about Vanessa’s life on Eris, old secrets come spiralling out. Letters and diaries revealed long-buried misdeeds and an increasingly dangerous web of connections. And before long, the secrets of Eris are spilling into Fairburn’s gilded halls…

I loved the way that Hawkins weaved together the various strands of The Blue Hour. Snippets from Vanessa’s diaries and correspondence are interspersed with chapters narrated by Grace and Becker, building up a picture of a woman far more complicated than either her devoted friend or her long-time fan can paint on their own. Vanessa is, in many ways, a palimpsest: viewed through her work or through the memories of others but never fully visible until, as the novel progresses, the real woman emerges. This elusiveness could be maddeningly frustrating but, as in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca – a novel with which The Blue Hour shares more than a few tonal similarities – the pervasiveness of Vanessa’s presence encourages the reader to think about the ways in which Grace, Becker, and the other characters in the novel centre their lives – and, in the case of Becker, hang their aspirations upon – their imagined version of this dead woman.

I found the novel’s subplot slightly less successful. The complexities and tensions of Becker’s marriage to Helena are, I think, supposed to mirror those of Vanessa, her (missing) husband Julian, and her lover, However, whilst the parallels upped the psychologically stakes for Becker, I can’t say I was overly invested in events at Fairburn. They were interesting enough but, for me, broke the claustrophobic tension that was present in the sections set on Eris.

Grace, by contrast, was a fascinating bag of contradictions. By turns tentative and assertive, Grace was the often overlooked presence in Vanessa’s life. Ignored by art critics and dismissed by Vanessa’s friends, Grace’s role as executor of the estate – and gatekeeper of Vanessa’s secrets – makes her a subtly unreliable narrator of the very best kind. Although I can’t say I liked Grace I loved the way in which her sections played with the reader’s expectations and provided tantalising glimpses of secrets yet to unfold.

Saying any more about The Blue Hour would be to spoil the delights of watching the plot unfold but, needless to say, if you love a slow-burn psychological thriller of the Du Maurier variety, you’ll be enthralled from the very first page. Fans of Girl on the Train won’t be disappointed either but, for my money, The Blue Hour is a more complex and considered work that handles its themes with more depth and maturity than its earlier work. This does mean a slightly slower pace but, stick with it, and this is a novel that offers rich rewards.

NB: This review also appeared on my blog at https://theshelfofunreadbooks.wordpress.com as part of the blog tour for the book. My thanks go to the publisher for providing a copy of the book in return for an honest and unbiased review.