**The Lost Hours was sent to me in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to Random Things Tours & Harper Collins for having me on the tour.**

Summary

A perfect marriage… 

Golden couple Annie and David Crayce have it all. A loving marriage, three beautiful children, and a thriving family business. Life couldn’t be better. Until the unthinkable happens… 

A perfect crime? 

A piece of damning DNA evidence has arisen, placing David as the prime suspect of a murder committed twenty years ago. Annie is sure her David is innocent. But if he isn’t guilty, then either his father or brother must be. 

As the police investigate the cold case, so does Annie. Trawling through her old diaries, she begins desperately looking for answers. But it all comes down to a few lost hours she can’t solve. 

And Annie begins to doubt the one person she thought she knew best… Her husband.

Review

The Lost Hours is as twisty a psychological thriller as you can find! After Annie and David’s daughter, Sienna, finds herself in a bit of trouble with the police, their entire world comes crumbling down in the most unimaginable way.

It’s been twenty years since seventeen-year-old Karen Lomax disappeared and was subsequently found dead in 1999 and everyone accepted that her murderer may never be found… until David’s DNA comes to match that of her suspected killers. I really enjoyed the angle Lewis took with making it seem as though David was to blame for the death. Reading as all the characters started to cast doubt on each other made this a riveting book and easily kept you hooked. I felt like I was constantly second-guessing myself when trying to guess who the killer was.

The Crayce family seem to have an idyllic life – obviously before this crime is pinned on certain members. They’re tight-knit and hard workers at their family-run-and-owned shooting school. While I felt bad for Annie when her world was shattered with the revelation that David could have murdered this girl, I felt most sorry for their children, Sienna and Max. Not only were they terrorised at school once the news about their dad’s arrest broke on social media, but they also had to deal with the fact that they could lose him forever. Plus, there was no way of knowing if he committed the horrendous crime or not.

Since Sienna’s DNA being taken, due to a brush with the law, was the reason for David being blamed it wasn’t hard to understand her anguish when she then blamed herself for their lives being ruined. At that moment, I really felt for her because she’s just a child who made a stupid mistake and yet, was taking the enormity of this far more serious crime on her shoulders. Needless to say, she wasn’t alive when it took place so obviously, was not in any way involved in it.

Truly, the characters that broke my heart the most were Karen’s parents, Jess and Eddie. Losing their daughter so young is a pain no parent wants to ever experience. However, they handle it with such dignity and grace even when their baby was so cruelly taken from them. I might even wish we’d gotten to read more about them.

The Lost Hours was honestly the first psych thriller that I’ve read in a while where I hadn’t worked out the ending at least three chapters before the end of the book. Lewis has really written a brilliant book. My only niggle with it was the beginning as I felt the descriptions of the characters went on for too long. Personally, I like to dive right into the action and felt the start was lacking excitement.

I give The Lost Hours a rating of 4/5 stars. The majority of the book was engaging and kept me guessing, but the slow start was a slight let-down.