The Hollow Hours

The Hollow Hours

When the host is found dead, the island keeps its secrets. So do the guests.

When forensic psychologist Dr. Mara Voss accepts an invitation to Edmund Crane's remote Scottish island estate, she expects a weekend of polite company and professional flattery. What she finds is something far more carefully arranged.

Dunmara Island sits three miles off the Mallaig coast, accessible twice a week by ferry — less, when the Atlantic decides otherwise. Edmund Crane has assembled an unlikely gathering: his estranged son, his much-younger wife, his business partner, his physician, an old priest, and a journalist who smiles too readily. By midnight, a storm has sealed them in. By morning, Edmund is dead in his locked study.

Dr. Strand calls it cardiac failure. Mara calls it wrong.

As the gale holds the island hostage for days, Mara begins the quiet, precise work she knows best — not accusation, but attention. The kind of listening that uncovers what people are working hard not to say. And with each conversation, the picture that emerges is darker than a sudden death: a man who spent decades building an empire on buried things, who sent out invitations like a man arranging his own reckoning, and who toasted honesty, even when it's late at what turned out to be his final dinner.

Someone on this island knew what was coming.

Someone may have helped it arrive.

The Hollow Hours is a taut, atmospheric locked-room mystery for readers of And Then There Were None, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and The Maid at Grosvenor Square — steeped in Scottish coastal atmosphere, driven by a razor-sharp protagonist, and built on the unsettling premise that the most dangerous place to keep a secret is in a room full of people who already know it.

The storm will pass. The truth won't wait.