The Midnight Hour by Eve Chase

 

The Midnight Hour by Eve Chase.

Published 27th June 2024 by Michael Joseph.

From the cover of the book:

Notting Hill, London. One May evening, seventeen-year-old Maggie Parker's mother walks out of their front door and doesn't return . . .

With her little brother in tow, desperate to find her mother, Maggie is drawn into a labyrinthine world of antiques and shadowy figures. There she befriends someone else living on their wits. But can he help solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance?

Twenty-one years later, in a Parisian apartment, Maggie’s phone rings and her hard-won grown-up life shatters. While in London, the new owner of the Parker’s old house is excavating the basement, unaware of what might lie beneath.

Sweeping from bustling London streets, the boulevards of Paris to an old English country house, The Midnight Hour is a thrilling, richly woven story about a golden family with a hidden past – and a woman trying to turn back the hands of time before it’s too late.

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Notting Hill, 1998. When seventeen-year-old Maggie Parker's mother does not return from a night out, she finds herself in sole charge of her six-year-old brother, Kit, and at a loss to explain her disappearance. As the days go by, and their mother does not reappear, Maggie is forced to confront the truth that their lives may have unravelled a bit more since the death of her father than she has been prepared to acknowledge. With Kit in tow, Maggie wanders the streets of Notting Hill looking for her mother, where she meets antique dealer Wolf, a young man unlike any other she has met before - a meeting that takes them on a rocky path...

2019. Twenty years later, Maggie now lives in Paris and makes her living as a romance writer. She has regrets, but is more or less content, until a shocking phone call brings the past rushing back. The new owner of the Notting Hill house where she once lived is digging up the basement, and Maggie is terrified of what they might find. She must return to London and face the consequences of the events that brought her and Wolf together, and then tore them apart...

Eve Chase is one of those authors who knows now to write about messy families and secrets to utter perfection, and The Midnight Hour is a delicious showcase of her talents. Unfurling in two timelines from the perspectives of both Maggie and Kit, this novel weaves between 1998, when their mother went missing, and 2019, when the consequences of this disappearance come back to throw the lives of those affected into disarray.

Chase's plotting is superb, with layers of mystery that are peeled back over the course of the story. The little pieces of the puzzle come together ever so gradually, with Chase using the intense relationship that develops between Maggie, Kit and Wolf, in 1998, to explain how it shaped them into the people they are twenty years later. The disappearance of Maggie's mother proves to be the catalyst for everything that happens, flooding the whole book with reflected themes, in the past and the present, about secrets, lies, love, loss, expectation, memory, and how the weight of things unsaid has warped the dynamics of this family. 

The characterisation is gorgeous, beginning with the beautifully written central characters and branching outwards to family and friends who each have an important role to play in how the twists and turns develop. Maggie is especially well-written, flipping between the emotional turmoil of her seventeen-year-old self, as passionate feelings of first love conflict with the fear of her situation, and the grown woman filled with thoughts of what-could-have-been and terror for the future. And Kit is portrayed with such vulnerability that it is impossible not to feel a tenderness for him - something that puts your heart firmly in your mouth in the latter, gripping stages of the book. 

The fear of spoilers prevents me from waxing lyrical about how cleverly Chase manages every single aspect of this novel. With perfect pace, she carries you along on a thrilling tide from the intriguing hook of the opening chapter, to the tear-jerking finish - and I loved the little mentions of the filming of the movie Notting Hill along the way. I consumed it whole!

The Midnight House is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Michael Joseph for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Eve Chase writes page-turning mysteries set in beautiful places, thick with secrets. Her last novel, The Birdcage, won great acclaim and sales and The Glass House was a Sunday Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Book Club pick. The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde was longlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award and Black Rabbit Hall won the Saint-Maur en Poche prize in Paris for Best Foreign Fiction. Both were runaway Amazon bestsellers. The Midnight Hour is her fifth novel. Her novels have been translated into twenty languages. Married with three children, she lives in Oxford.