The Lost Hours by Karen White

The Lost Hours by Karen White
Publisher: Penguin
Genre: Contemporary
Length: Full (343 pages)
Heat: Sensual
Rating: 4.5 Books
Reviewed by Rose

When Piper Mills was twelve, she helped her grandfather bury a box that belonged to her grandmother in the backyard. For twelve years, it remained untouched.

Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper’s dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather’s death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn’t exist—or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace—and a newspaper article from 1939 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace’s charms tell the story of three friends during the 1930s— each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.

Karen White has done it again! The Lost Hours is a deeply engrossing novel of love lost, mysteries literally buried for generations, and women coming to grip with the fact that sometimes those we love best we know least.

The characters in this book are richly drawn and move the story forward. Emotions will wash over the reader as story is told from multiple points of view. And, whether you agree with the characters' actions or not, Ms. White makes you understand why they thought they had to do what they did.

Difficult subjects (Alzheimers, race relations, murder, and suicide) are dealt with honestly and in a way that draws the reader in to a world they may not know.

Karen White has penned a book rich with imagery, passion, and pathos. A book that will make you sorry to put it down once the last page has been turned. The Lost Hours is a book you could turn to time and again.