Whatever Wednesday - The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins

 Oh my,  Paula  Hawkins has written quite the tension filled, WTF, suspenseful book - The  Blue Hour. 

cover blurb: Eris is an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day. 

Vanessa - a famous artist lived here. Her unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years  ago. 

Grace, Vanessa's best friend (?) inherited the home and is content in  her isolation. She fiercely protects the legacy of Vanessa. 

But  - there's a shocking discovery.  One of Vanessa's art pieces contains a human bone. 

An art  gallery visitor arrives to  investigate.  The secrets of Eris threaten  to emerge....

I will not divulge more.  This is a page  turner with way too many twists and turns.  Holy cow!

Book Review - Into the Water

I had high expectations for Paula Hawkins’ next book after her excellent The Girl on the Train. 

Into the Water proved worthwhile but did not blow me away. From the cover blurb the book is an addictive new novel of psychological suspense about the slipperiness of truth – and one family drowning in secrets.

Nell Abbott had been researching the various deaths by drowning in the local river. All young females, all mostly declared suicides. Now Nell is dead. Was she influenced by her research? Was she suicidal? Or was this murder?  Nell’s daughter – a vulnerable angry teen is being taken care of by Nell’s sister, Jules. Jules and Nell had been estranged, so the family dynamics are messy and Jules is not comfortable with dealing with her niece. Various detectives offer their narrative too. Plus we have the strange local flavor of the town psychic, etc.  Also, Hawkins reverts to the past to give viewpoints from previous drowning victims.

I like first person chapters, but this book had too many people telling their story and it was hard to keep a continuing thread for forward progress. Into the Water is well written. It ultimately zooms along rapidly at the end to tie everything up. The book was good, not fabulous. There was a lot of deception and hidden secrets in a small town.  

From the cover blurb – Beware a calm surface – you never know what lies beneath.

Book Review - The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

From the cover blurb – There she sits, the girl on the train. What she sees, gazing out the window, will change everything.  Indeed, Rachel rides the slow commuter train, often drinking gin and tonic from a can (yes, she has a problem). The train stops and she can see a young couple on their terrace. She names them Jess and Jason and assumes their lives are lovely. One day though, she sees another man kiss Jess. Later in the week, the news announces a woman is missing, and Rachel realizes that’s “her Jess”. Does Rachel have valuable information for the police? Is she reliable enough? 

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is a page turner with a mystery, messy characters, and it’s a compulsive read.  The night the woman went missing, Rachel awoke from a blackout with blood on her head. She remembered something about the underpass on her walk from the train. She is a walking disaster – divorced but still calling her ex-husband Tom. She’s practically received a restraining order from him and his new wife, Anna, to stay away from them and their baby. Rachel’s lost her job and her roommate has issued an ultimatum and a date to kick her out.  

As Rachel tries to remember what happened to her that night, she realizes that the incident is entangled with the missing woman. She even reaches out to the husband (real name is Scott) who is a prime suspect. Everyone is fair game in this mystery. No one is a nice person and everyone has a complicated back story.  

p. 318  You can feel it: it’s like the hum of electric lights, the change in atmosphere, as the train pulls up to the red signal. I’m not the only one who looks now. I suppose that everyone does it – looks at the houses they pass – only we all see them differently.  

The ever present train gives the author, Paula Hawkins, a way of viewing the world from a different angle. It’s a neat perspective. Join Rachel, The Girl on the Train, and help her find herself and solve the mystery of one night. Don’t be lulled by the clickety-clack of the old train. Punch a roundtrip ticket – it could take a while.