The Midnight Hour by Eve Chase

 

Publisher: Ballantine Books

On Sale Date: August 5, 2025

Pages: 320

I reviewed a digital review copy from the publisher

The Midnight Hour by Eve Chase is a story that takes you to London's Notting Hill in 1998 and twenty years later in 2019. In 1998, Maggie is a 17 year old teenager that lives with her eccentric and not very stabile celebrity mother Dee Delancey and her younger brother Kit, who is adopted, in a house in Notting Hill. Everything goes normal, until one day when Dee doesn't return home and Maggie and Kit have no clue where she could be. The next weeks she also doesn't return and has to seem vanished without a trace.Maggie doesn't plan to call the police, afraid they will take Kit away. A friend from the neighborhood named Wolf, a guy who works in his uncle's antique shop keeps a bit of an eye on Maggie and Kit and Maggie and Wolf stay friends, also when Maggie and Kit move to Paris all of a sudden because a man unknown to them starts threatening her and Kit, and claims that he is Kit's father and can take him away any minute. Maggie has to do everything to protect her brother now her mom is missing, even if it means fleeing to Paris to her aunt. Will her mother ever surface again??

Twenty years later in 2019 now novelist Maggie is back in London from Paris, and apparently her mother has passed away. She gets a call from Wolf that their old house is renovated, and immediately she goes into panic mode; what if the renovators discover the secret that is buried there, she could get in big trouble..

She also meets up again with her aunt Cora, who they escaped to in Paris after things got out of hand back in 1998. Aunt Cora knows more about Kit's history, and during the story, the reader gets to learn all the secrets of Maggie's mother and about Wolf and aunt Cora too, secrets that better stay buried...

The Midnight Hour bt Eve Chase is a book that completely surprised me! I started reading it blankly, not knowing what to expect. I truly like the storyline of it and the characters as well. Everything in this novel was in the right place at the right time. It also had a thrilling mystery aspect to it, and at almost every page there was an unexpected twist and turn that truly kept it very entertaining. As a reader you truly want to know how this story, that truly had some tragic parts, ends.

The characters where portrayed well and are very realistic, they truly can be your neighbors or friends. The shifting in time between 1998 and 2019 was also done very well, it alternates in the chapters, and for this book this works perfectly.

Overall, this is a book I truly like and I found it highly entertaining and a true pageturner! This is a book I highly recommend.