BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: The Blue Hour (Paula Hawkins, author)
Contemporary fiction, mystery, thriller, Scotland, fine art, painter/sculptor/ceramicist, museums and exhibits, missing people, female protagonist, unlikely villain.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: The Blue Hour (Paula Hawkins, author)
Where is the missing husband? Paula Hawkins, author of best-seller made-into-movie, The Girl on the Train, is hitting the charts again with a new and sophisticated thriller–The Blue Hour. Set on a remote island called Eris, located off the coast of Scotland, The Blue Hour is a dark and twisty mystery set in the world of art and privilege.
Eris is a tidal island; access on, or off, the island over the crossing channel is accessible only twice a day at low tide for limited periods of time. The island is where Vanessa Chapman, a well-known painter, found-objects sculptor, and ceramicist lived and worked. Her work has been exhibited in tony museums all over Europe. After her death, her will directs that her entire body of work is to be held by the Fairburn Foundation-a small family arts foundation headed by a former lover of hers. The Foundation mounts an exhibit of Chapman’s work at the Tate Modern, and trouble arises. An anthropologist who visits the exhibit informs the Tate that an object in one of the pieces (named Division II) has been incorrectly described as the rib of a deer. He advises that the object is, in fact, a human rib bone.
James Becker, the curator of the Fairburn Foundation, is a school mate of Sebastian Fairburn, the sole heir to the Fairburn fortune. Sebastian became the head of the Foundation upon his father’s death. Beck, as he is known, is a lifelong fan and student of Vanessa Chapman’s art. Beck oversees the ongoing process of securing the balance of the Chapman’s work, papers and studio materials which are being begrudgingly meted out by Vanessa Chapman’s friend and housemate, Grace. The possibility that Division II contains human remains (rendering it illegal to exhibit), gives Beck cause to visit Eris to discuss the piece with Grace, and possibly to lay eyes on Chapman’s house and studio. It all begins innocently enough.
Piece by piece the history of Vanessa’s life on Eris Island seeps out. The bone in Division II sis sent to a lab for analysis. While the players await the results of the testing, the story unfolds. Grace shares only some of Vanessa’s journals with Beck. The journals relay the artist’s thoughts and process for each piece. Beck visits the house or Eris and sees first-hand the locations in the house and on the island where Vanessa created some of her most famous works. Unbeknownst to Beck, Grace has secreted away and withheld from the estate three of Vanessa’s paintings. The hidden paintings are precious to Grace because in each of them Vanessa depicts Grace. Grace also withholds from Beck journals which reveal the mixed feelings Vanessa had about her friendship with Grace due to Grace’s sometimes hovering presence. Theirs is an unusual friendship, somewhere between friends and lovers.
A headlining unsolved mystery surrounded Vanessa for several decades before her death. Julian, Vanessa’s ex-husband and on-again, off-again lover, went missing after his last visit to Vanessa on Eris Island. His car was seen racing through the village in town after Vanessa had left the island for a gallery exhibit opening in Glasgow. The story grows darker and darker as the story unfolds. By the end of the book, not one but three murders (and a serial killer) are revealed.
Hawkins’ greatest gift is her pacing and restraint. She drops clues in plain sight throughout the book. At the end of the book, when all is revealed, in a fairly horrific ending, the clues echo back from unlikely places–the dementia of the lonely Marguerite who lives in a cottage overlooking the harbor, the photographs stowed in boxes in Vanessa’s studio, Vanessa’s artwork itself, the entries in the artists journals, and even the descriptions of the wooded paths around the island.
A sophisticated and stormy mystery and thriller, probing the depths of obsession, The Blue Hour is a tantalizing read for thriller enthusiasts.
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