[Review] The Vanishing Hour - Seraphina Nova Glass

Summary: Grace Holloway keeps to herself. Since narrowly escaping death at the hands of the man who kidnapped her, she’s thrown herself into the small inn she runs in Rock Harbor, Maine. It’s quiet, quaint and, in the off-season, completely isolated—the perfect place for Grace to keep her own secrets.

But Grace isn’t the only one with something to hide, and Rock Harbor isn’t just a sleepy vacation town. Someone is taking young women—girls who look an awful lot like Grace did when she was kidnapped so many years ago.

When a surge of disappearances brings the investigation to her door, Grace finds herself unwillingly at the center of it all and doing everything she can to keep her distance. Because Grace knows something…something that could change everything. And when the truth comes to light, getting justice for the vanished might be more than Grace can handle alone… (Pub Date: May 30 2023)

 

Told from multiple points of view, this is a mystery about the disappearance of some people in a town. Some years ago a couple of girls had disappeared for weeks only to be found without their lives, and now two elderly men and a teenager are also gone, everyone in a similar way, from the same region in town and around the same hour. It's a battle against time to find them before they also end up dead.

This was a page turner. The style is easy to read, and the characters, though I feel I still don't know almost anything about them, they were nice enough that you cared for their feelings. However, even before it's over you realize how underwhelming it all is. There is a mystery. I liked the conclusion to it. I was surprised by the plot twists. But the characters were very shallow. I'm not even sure what job one of the main characters have. Or maybe I just know the job of one of them, Grace, who takes care of the inn where the son of one of the disappeared ends up. But you finish the book without understanding how that job even existed.

Likewise, the explanations for things the author needed for the plot were too loose. I need this place in the middle of nowhere. So I just insert it there. And that's just an example, a lot of the book worldbuilding is like a paper background for the stage you shouldn't really look at or it'll be too obviously fake. Only after a while it's hard not to look at it, and the illusion crumbles. And considering it deals with heavier themes like drugs, prostitution, kidnapping, and rape, it deserved more depth.

It's a good thriller to read without thinking, it'll entertain you. I liked the read itself and will recommend to anyone looking for a beach read. In fact, I plan to read more by this author, especially when I'm looking for a page turner. But it's not a solid story as it could have been.

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Rating: 3 out of 5.