Book Review
When you’ve been glued to nearly three-quarters of a novel, you naturally expect fireworks at the climax — a payoff worthy of the build-up. So when the climax arrives, it doesn’t feel like a peak — more like a plateau. There’s a resolution, yes, and some threads are tied up, but without that emotional high or cathartic twist that many readers may have been hoping for. It’s more of a quiet fade-out than a firework finale.
The story offers one of the most evocative settings I’ve read in a while. The atmosphere in The Blue Hour is haunting. Bleak, remote, and almost oppressively quiet, the setting — a lonely house on a desolate island — is rendered so vividly that it transcends being mere backdrop and becomes a character in its own right. Hawkins uses the physical isolation of the landscape to mirror the internal isolation of her characters, and she does it brilliantly. The stillness and the ever-present sense of being cut off from the rest of the world — all of it builds a creeping tension that makes you feel like something is always about to snap.
That’s not to say Paula Hawkins isn’t a masterful storyteller. On the contrary, her ability to weave through multiple threads and shift perspectives is nothing short of impressive. The problem lies in the emotional investment: with so much happening, with so many flawed and layered characters, it becomes difficult to find one you can truly root for. And when the climax arrives, instead of exploding, it simmers — quietly, perhaps too quietly for the kind of story it promised to be.
The Blue Hour is not a bad book — far from it. It’s intricately crafted, thematically rich, and stylistically polished. Hawkins still knows how to keep readers hooked, how to create tension out of ordinary interactions, how to suggest that danger might be hiding just beneath the surface.
But if you go into this novel expecting the same kind of narrative punch that characterized The Girl on the Train or Into the Water, you might walk away slightly disappointed. The Blue Hour is more meditative than thrilling, more psychologically probing than plot-driven — and while that may appeal to some, it might not satisfy those looking for a more electrifying climax.
The Blue Hour is meticulously crafted and absolutely worth reading for Hawkins’ narrative skill, but temper your expectations when it comes to pay off.
My Rating
Book Blurb
Welcome to Eris: An island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day.
Once home to Vanessa: A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago.
Now home to Grace: A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation.
But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.
And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge . . .
A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, The Blue Hour recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.
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