The Dying Hour by Jane Jesmond is an enjoyable police procedural mystery that grabbed my attention from the first few pages and while it didn’t keep my focus in the same way throughout the book still turned out to be an enjoyable read.
Josh Mason is a young officer in a small town in Yorkshire who is sent to deal with a complaint about barking dogs, and finds a gruesome scene instead. The rest of the book deals with finding out what happened and who could commit such a horrendous crime.
The Dying Hour is told from multiple points of view, I think I counted 9 plus a few chapters that were transcripts of police reports and/or short chapters from an unknown point of view. I’m used to reading books with multiple points of view, but at one point I felt like it got to be a bit much, especially for the few where the point of view was from a very minor character, and was only for a single short chapter. I think at least 3 points of view could have been eliminated by conveying information from those chapters in some other way.
I was also a bit confused about who the main character of the book was supposed to be. Initially I felt like Josh was the main character of the story, but at about the halfway point it felt like the main character changed to Kezia, Josh’s aunt. I’m not sure why the author chose to take this approach, it felt kind of weird, and became less police procedural, and more amateur detective novel at that point.
There were a lot of interesting theories about the motive, and who committed the crime, unfortunately I guessed very early on who committed the crime, and even though I kept thinking that the answer could not possibly be so obvious, in the end I was proven to be right. It kind of ruined the whole mystery for me.
In the end The Dying Hour was a good read, it would have been better if I hadn’t guessed the culprit, but I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys police procedurals with a dark atmosphere.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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