by Lori Rader-Day
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2014
331 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic - until a student she'd never met shot her.
He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why?
All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction ends in tears (hers). Her fellow faculty members seem uncomfortable with her, and her ex - whom she may or may not still love - has moved on.
Enter Nathaniel Barber, a graduate student obsessed with Chicago's violent history. Nath is a serious scholar, but also a serious mess about his first heartbreak, his mother's death, and his father's disapproval. Assigned as Amelia's teaching assistant, Nath also takes on the investigative legwork that Amelia can't do. And meanwhile, he's hoping she'll approve his dissertation topic, the reason he came to grad school in the first place: the student attack on Amelia Emmet.
Together and at cross-purposes, Amelia and Nathaniel stumble toward a truth that will explain the attack and take them both through the darkest hours of their lives.
"Starred Review. Chapters that alternate between Amelia and Nath's viewpoints provide an irresistible combination of menace, betrayal, and self-discovery." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Amelia Emmet is a sympathetic, yet jaded and darkly witty main character. An unputdownable read." - Booklist
This information about The Black Hour was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lori Rader-Day is the author of the mystery The Black Hour. Born and raised in central Indiana, she now lives with her husband and dog in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Time Out Chicago, The Madison Review, and others. Best-selling author Jodi Picoult chose one of Lori's short stories for the grand prize in Good Housekeeping's first fiction contest. Lori is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and International Thriller Writers. Visit her at LoriRaderDay.com or on Twitter at @LoriRaderDay.
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