Patrice McDonough is a former educator who taught history for more than three decades. A member of the Historical Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America, and the Historical Novel Society, she splits her time between New Jersey and the Florida Gulf Coast.
McDonough's new novel, A Slash of Emerald, is her second Dr. Julia Lewis mystery.
At CrimeReads the author tagged nine titles featuring "dastardly deeds in rarified settings." One title on the list:
Paula Hawkins, The Blue HourRead about the other entries on the list.
Does anyone do dread better than Paula Hawkins? The Blue Hour (2024), her fourth psychological thriller, is a quieter story than Hawkins’ sensational debut, The Girl on the Train. This novel’s macabre menace creeps insidiously,opening with a polite but unsettling letter from a forensic anthropologist to the Tate Modern. The exhibit label for a mixed-media sculpture by the late Vanessa Chapman is wrong: the bone in the piece is human, not animal. Ten years before her death, the artist’s philandering, parasitic husband disappeared without a trace. Could the fragment be his?
The story unfolds along two timelines and in three points of view. Art historian James Becker is searching for Chapman’s missing pieces and papers. Dr. Grace Haswell, the artist’s companion, stands in his way. Vanessa Chapman speaks to the reader in diary excerpts and letters curated by Grace. The Blue Hour is about obsession: Becker with the artist’s work, Grace with Vanessa, Vanessa with her art and secrets. Where it’s all heading seems clear enough: a confrontation on Eris, the isolated island battered by the “terrible chaos” of wind and waves where Chapman spent her final years. Still, what happens in the novel’s final moments—at the blue hour, before the stars appear, and color vanishes from sea and sky—jolts.
--Marshal Zeringue
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