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Summary
Summary
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Moment and Five Days comes "the best book about Morocco since The Sheltering Sky. Completely absorbing and atmospheric" (Philip Kerr).
Robin knew Paul wasn't perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true.
She is a meticulous accountant, almost forty. He is an artist and university professor, twenty years older. When Paul suggests a month in Morocco, where he once lived and worked, a place where the modern meets the medieval, Robin reluctantly agrees.
Once immersed into the swirling, white hot exotica of a walled city on the North African Atlantic coast, Robin finds herself acclimatizing to its wonderful strangeness. Paul is everything she wants him to be--passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant.
But then Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry. As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape.
With his acclaimed ability to write thought-provoking page-turners, Douglas Kennedy takes readers into a world where only Patricia Highsmith has ever dared. The Blue Hour is a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: What would you do if your life depended on it?
Author Notes
Douglas Kennedy was born in New York City in 1955. He attended the Collegiate School at Trinity College in Dublin, and graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1976. Kennedy worked briefly as a journalist in Maine and as a stage manager in New York. In 1978, he traveled to Ireland for a two-week visit and ended up staying there, living in Dublin for the next 11 years. It was at this time that Kennedy began to write in his spare time, and five years later, he turned his attention to writing full-time.
Kennedy first supported himself as a playwright. His early radio plays, Shakespeare on Five Dollars a Day and The Don Giovanni Blues, were broadcast by the BBC. Kennedy's first book, Beyond the Pyramids, was published in London in 1988. In the next few years, Kennedy went on to write two more travelogues and the novel The Dead Heart, none of which were ever published in the United States. It wasn't until 1997 that one of Kennedy's books made an American debut.
The book, The Big Picture, focuses on a suburban yuppie lawyer who throws his life away with one sudden act of violence. A selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club, film rights have been optioned by Fox 2000 and foreign rights have been sold in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Norway, and Spain.
In addition to his books, Douglas Kennedy is a much-published journalist whose work regularly appears in such London publications as The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, British GQ, and Arena.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Kennedy's (Five Days) melodramatic yet highly entertaining novel, a woman on vacation in Morocco learns that her husband has deceived her in a shocking way. Successful accountant Robin Danvers, after a failed first marriage, hopes she's finally found love and the possibility of parenthood when she meets the wildly talented, passionate artist Paul Leuen. Early in their marriage, his frivolous way with money causes friction, but a romantic trip to Morocco seems just the thing to strengthen their relationship, and maybe they'll conceive a child. When Robin discovers a profound betrayal by Paul, she leaves their hotel without confronting him, only to return to a ransacked room, blood on the wall, and Paul nowhere in sight, putting her at the center of a police inquiry. Kennedy effectively captures the wonders and the darkness of Morocco while propelling Robin on a fraught, dangerous journey filled with increasingly disturbing discoveries of Paul's many secrets. Though there are a few over-the-top moments, the story of a woman who must reconcile her intense love for a man who wasn't who he appeared to be, while finding her own strength, is an expertly painted one. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A dream Moroccan vacation turns into a series of progressively more disastrous misadventures for an accountant from Buffalo. Robin turned to accounting in her 30s as a hedge against the unpredictability of life. Ignoring her now deceased mother's very cogent warnings, she marries Paul, who at 58 is 18 years her senior. He's an artist of middling reputation and an inveterate spendthriftthey meet while Robin is handling his IRS woes. Robin wants a child, and Paul, whose chief attractions seem to be in the bedroom, appears to be on board. He surprises her with a trip to Morocco, site of his formative adventures as a young artist, and at first their stay in Essaouira, miles from Casablanca, is all lovely sunsets and wine-soaked trysts. Paul is producing his finest drawings ever in a local cafe when Robin makes her first fateful mistakechecking email on vacation: an associate has discovered receipts for Paul's vasectomy. Livid, she leaves a nasty note and storms out, returning later to find the hotel room spattered with blood and torn-up artwork. Remorseful, she embarks on a frantic search for Paul. One step ahead of the gendarmes who suspect her of murder, she flees to Casablanca, where she discovers, with increasing horror, that Paul has a Moroccan ex-wife, an adult daughter, and a former friend who has become his worst enemy, the affable but sinister Ben Hassan. Hassan, once a painter before an escapade involving Paul destroyed his career, has extended the kind of loan Paul is singularly ill-equipped to repay. And that is only the beginning of Robin's descent into hell. It would be unfair to reveal more, except that readers will continually be urging her, no-o-o, don't do that! And she will ignore their advice just as she ignored her mother's. Despite her appallingly bad judgment, Robin still manages a laughable degree of smug self-satisfaction. Kennedy has a knack for portraying characters readers love to hate. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It's love at first sight when artist Paul walks into accountant Robin's office in need of help with his muddled finances. Robin is the cautious type, but despite some misgivings about Paul's reckless spending, she marries him, drawn by the bohemian lure, the romantic effluence, the hallucinogenic sex. Three years into the marriage, Paul tells her they will be flying off to Morocco to spend a month in the seaside town of Essaouira, where he taught art many years ago. Their stay is idyllic until Robin learns of a deception on Paul's part and, shattered, determines to leave him. Then Paul vanishes. Certain that she is the only one who can keep him out of trouble, Robin sets off on a journey across Morocco, following a decades-old trail of betrayal and revenge. She is also on the run from the police, who believe she had a hand in Paul's disappearance. Douglas (Five Days, 2013) writes with verve, and plot twists, several sharply drawn characters, and an exotic locale give the novel a cinematic quality. Hand this to readers looking for a page-turner with a strong female protagonist.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2015 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Resilient and optimistic despite almost half a lifetime of frustration with her flawed and distant parents and a failed first marriage, 40-year-old Robin Danvers is overjoyed to meet and marry Paul, who appears to be the man of her dreams. Paul is an art professor, an accomplished artist himself, and a great romantic. Unfortunately, he is also deeply in debt, undisciplined in all sorts of dangerous ways, and ominously evasive about his past. A vacation to Morocco that Paul has planned turns into a catastrophe when he mysteriously disappears, leaving Robin alone in Casablanca. All manner of lurid revelations and adventures follow as Robin attempts to find Paul and unravel the mystery of their marriage. -Kennedy (Five Days) is known for his portrayal of strong women, and Robin is certainly tough and resourceful if a bit too trusting; readers will likely find her courage and tenacity admirable. VERDICT This skillfully written page-turner develops considerable momentum and dramatic tension, though the literary ambition that informed Kennedy's earlier work is not in evidence here. Recommended for readers looking for an entertaining roller-coaster of a read featuring a strong, modern female protagonist. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester -Community Coll., CT © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Blue Hour ONE FIRST LIGHT. AND I didn't know where I was anymore. The sky outside: was it a curved rotunda of emerging blue? The world was still blurred at its edges. I tried to piece together my whereabouts, the exact geographic location within which I found myself. A sliver of emerging clarity. Or maybe just a few basic facts. I was on a plane. A plane that had just flown all night across the Atlantic. A plane bound for a corner of North Africa. A country which, when viewed cartographically, looks like a skullcap abreast a continent. According to the flight progress monitor illuminating the back-of-the-seat screen facing me, we were still seventy-three minutes and 842 kilometers (I was flying into a metric world) from our destination. This journey hadn't been my idea. Rather I'd allowed myself to be romanced into it by the man whose oversize frame (as in six foot four) was scrunched into the tiny seat next to mine. The middle seat in this horror movie of an aircraft. No legroom, no wiggle room, every seat taken, at least six screaming babies, a husband and wife fighting in hissed Arabic, bad ventilation, bad air-conditioning, one-hour line for the bathroom after the plastic meal they served us, the rising aroma of collective night sweats hanging over this hellhole of a cabin. Thank God I had made Paul pack his zopiclone. Those pills induce sleep in even the most sleep-impossible conditions. I had put aside all my concerns about pharmaceuticals and asked him for one. It gave me three hours' respite from this high-altitude sweatbox confinement. Paul. My husband. It was a new marriage--just three years old. Truth be told, we loved each other. We were passionate about each other. We often said we were beyond fortunate to have found each other. And I truly believed that. Never mind that the day before we legalized our relationship and committed to each other for the rest of our lives, I was silently convincing myself that I could change some of Paul's worrying inclinations; that, in time, things would tick upward, stabilize. Especially since we had decided that the moment was right to become parents. Out of nowhere, Paul suddenly began to mumble something in his sleep, its incoherency growing in volume, indicating serious subconscious agitation. When it reached a decibel level that woke our neighbor--an elderly man sleeping in his gray-tinted glasses--I touched my husband's arm, trying to rouse him out of his nightmare. It took several further unnerving moments of shouting before he snapped awake, looking at me as if he had no idea who I was. "What . . . where . . . I don't . . . ?" His wide-eyed bemusement was suddenly replaced by the look of a bewildered little boy. "Am I lost?" he asked. "Hardly," I said, taking his hand. "You just had a bad dream." "Where are we?" "Up in the air." "And where are we going?" "Casablanca." He appeared surprised at this news. "And why are we doing that, Robin?" I kissed him on the lips. And posed a question: "Adventure?" Excerpted from The Blue Hour by Douglas Kennedy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.