The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins

 

I like the title of this book. The blue hour is the time when the sun has briefly set (or the time right before sunrise) when the sky is blue but the sun isn't there. It's very pretty, but it can trick you into wondering where the sun has gone. The author titled the book The Blue Hour as a reference to the pretty things that aren't what they seem to be. The premise of this book is good. A well-known artist Vanessa Chapman has passed away. She left her art to Douglas Lennox, who owns a gallery. Her art is on display at the gallery, and someone notices one of the sculptures has a real human bone in it. Whose bone is it? The mystery starts here. However, the book gets unreasonably complicated. It's a lot of investment for a book with a mediocre story. Half the book is told through Vanessa's diaries. I'm not a big fan of using diaries as storytelling but it's not always a problem. This book just didn't feel like it told the story very well. 

James Becker (goes by Becker) works as a curator at the Fairburn Foundation, where the gallery and the Fairburn Estate are. When he's informed that there's a human bone in the sculpture, he consults the current owner of the estate, Emmeline Lennox, the wife of Douglas Lennox. Emmeline is an evil woman, who got away with killing Douglas years earlier. Emmeline thinks this could be a good media opportunity for the gallery, so she tells Becker to investigate. Becker realizes the timeline of the making of that sculpture coincides with the time Vanessa's husband disappeared, so he wonders if that bone belongs to him. He reaches out to Grace, Vanessa's long-time friend and executor of the will. Grace lives on a remote island. Becker decides to pay her a visit.

We eventually learn that Grace had killed Julian (Vanessa's husband), Vanessa, and an old friend named Nick Riley. Grace is a doctor, so she has access to drugs. She seems to have some real mental issues surrounding abandonment and I think she had romantic feelings for Vanessa. She killed Julian over jealousy of his relationship with Vanessa (who is his own wife). She killed Nick when they had a fight and buried his body in the woods. Later, Vanessa (who lived with Grace at the time), found a bone from that burial and assumed it was an animal bone and used it for her sculpture. Grace killed Vanessa later when Vanessa had stage four cancer. Grace says it's a mercy killing but she knows it's at least partly for leaving her.

When Becker figures this all out, Grace is ready to kill him too. She drugged him with morphine, put him in the car, and drove it into the water.  He was exceptionally dumb to not realize she intended to kill him. At the end of the book, Becker talks about seeing blue light. Many readers wonder if it means he was going to get rescued, blue light meaning police car's light, but I think the blue light he was seeing is the ocean water. The audio narrator sounded quite depressing during that sentence, so I don't think it was meant to be a survival story. Although I'm not sure how much stock we should put into the emotions of the narrator.

Overall, not a terrible book, but not a book I would recommend because the story isn't all that relatable. It seems everyone dies in this book - Julian, Vanessa, Becker, Nick, and even Grace - who kills herself at the end. Blah.

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