"The Blue Hour" | Reviewed by Pat Sainz

“The Blue Hour,” by Paula Hawkins, is a testament to the author’s gift for creating mystique and psychological suspense through unsettling mood and awe-inspiring atmosphere and setting.

  Eris Island near Edinburgh, Scotland, is the star of the novel. It's technically not an island but an isolated causeway inaccessible for six hours twice a day because of high tides. The Irish Sea churns magnificently below cliffs, hills, trees, and woods that make up Eris Island.

During the day, Eris Island reflects brilliant and varying colors of yellows, oranges, golds, blues, and primrose in the sky and on the land. Still, the land remains mostly isolated because of its frequent inaccessibility.

Vanessa Hughes was the lone inhabitant of the island. She was a renowned painter, who sculpted and created ceramics. She was described as brilliant, private, tricky, disagreeable, and impatient. She bought the only home on the island following a divorce from her unfaithful husband. He disappeared following a visit to Vanessa 20 years before her own death which occurred just after the Covid-19 pandemic.

     Following her illness and death, Vanessa left her life’s work to Douglas Lennox and his family. They control the nearby Fairburn Foundation which collects and loans art to museums. 

      Vanessa named Grace Haswell, a lonely, mysterious, and possessive doctor to be her executor. Grace continued to live on the island after Vanessa’s death. Grace is keeping many of Vanessa’s works to herself, refusing to turn over letters and many pieces of artwork.  

     James Becker, an art curator of Vanessa’s work and creative director of the Fairburn Foundation, is tasked with confronting Grace about her refusal to turn over the valuable artistic items left on Eris Island. Becker’s experiences with Grace are shocking and grim.

A call from a curator of the Tate Modern in London reveals that a glass display containing several artifacts created by Vanessa may possibly contain a human bone as opposed to the deer bone believed to be in the display.  Becker has an urgent need to access Vanessa’s endowments to the foundation before an announcement is made that may affect the worth of her art.    

The elderly Grace is drawn to Becker because he reminds her of a former acquaintance with whom she was close. She connects with him because he is fascinated with all things Vanessa, not just her art. Just as is Grace.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I had to reread the last chapter because of the shocking end. I suspect Hawkin’s newest novel will become a bestseller in the vein of “The Girl on the Train.”

Buy the Book.