The Lost Hours by Susan Lewis

 

The Lost Hours by Susan Lewis.

Published 1st April 2021 by Harper Collins.

From the cover of the book:

A perfect marriage…

Golden couple Annie and David Crayce have it all. A loving marriage, three beautiful children and a thriving family business. Life couldn’t be better. Until the unthinkable happens…

 
A perfect crime?

A piece of damning DNA evidence has arisen, placing David as the prime suspect of a murder committed twenty-years ago. Annie is sure her David is innocent. But if he isn’t guilty, then either his father or brother must be.

As the police investigate the cold case, so does Annie. Trawling through her old diaries, she begins desperately looking for answers. But it all comes down to a few lost hours she can’t solve.

And Annie begins to doubt the one person she thought she knew best… Her husband.

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December 2019, and golden couple Annie and David Crayce are looking forward to a fabulous Christmas up on Exmoor, at Hanley Court Estate, with their three beautiful children and close-knit extended family. Little do they know that the New Year is about to bring their perfect world crashing down around their ears.

January sees a piece of damning evidence coming to light that links one of the Crayce men to a cold case police investigation into the murder of a teenage girl twenty years ago. At first, Annie is certain that there has been mistake, because how could David, his brother, or their father be guilty of such a horrible crime, especially her loving husband David. But as time passes and the pressure of the investigation takes its toll on both their family and once thriving shooting school business, she is less sure. Searching through her past diaries, she knows David was At Hanley Court at the time of the murder, and reports of what happened that night are hazy at best. What is the truth of the matter and does she know her husband as well as she thought she did?

Welcome to a world with a perfect couple, surrounded by a perfect family, living the perfect country life in their prefect manor house. But how much of this is actually true? What does it take before the cracks in the veneer of this perfect world let secrets and lies bleed through?

Here we have a story where Susan Lewis spins a tale that exposes the truth that not everything is always as perfect as it first appears. Our golden couple may indeed have a loving and apparently healthy relationship, but it is not until we start to do a little digging that we realise there are some murky goings on in the past, and things have not always been quite as they are now. 

As the pressure mounts on the Crayce family and their nearest and dearest, at the hands of a lead investigator with something to prove, twists and turns galore are thrown our way before we find out the shocking truth about what happened all those years ago - and it was a truth that totally blindsided me!

I must admit that I did struggle with this book at the beginning, because the premise was a little too on the Aga Saga side for my tastes, there were a lot of characters introduced in the first few pages, and the lead investigator clearly had a few issues to work through before the case could be solved. But it began to dawn on me about half way through that the picture of perfection and the thrusting female detective were deliberate story devices on the part of the author, and once I had my head around this notion, I was able to enjoy the way she picks apart the relationships and motives of the characters under the auspices of a murder mystery. 

As Lewis spins her threads, she brings in some very interesting themes too, which were rather a surprise given the place where the story begins. We get a close look at the nature of marriage, family relationships, desire, infidelity, jealousy and revenge, but there is a dark thread about unresolved trauma, repressed memories and PTSD too - and, a little nod to a world in which women often have to work twice as hard to be accepted in the work place than their male counterparts.

This is my first Susan Lewis and turned out to be a lot darker than I was expecting, with a beautifully rich, character led story. It was a bit of a slow burner for me, but I did find myself getting completely caught up in the story, and enjoyed the shocker of an ending very much. It is easy to see from this book why Susan Lewis is an internationally bestselling author! 

The Lost Hours is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer.

Thank you to Harper Collins for ending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Susan Lewis is the internationally bestselling author of over forty books across the genres of family drama, thriller, suspense and crime, including One Minute Later, My Lies, Your Lies and Forgive Me.

Susan’s novels have sold nearly three million copies in the UK alone. She is also the author of Just One More Day and One Day at a Time, the moving memoirs of her childhood in Bristol during the 1960s.

Susan has previously worked as a secretary in news and current affairs before training as a production assistant working on light entertainment and drama. She’s lived in Hollywood and the South of France, but now resides in Gloucestershire with husband James, two stepsons and dogs.