Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

Three Hours, 2020, is Rosamund Lupton’s fourth book.  Her first, Sister, 2010, was one of novels that presaged the current flood of psychological thrillers.  It was an immediate bestseller; out two years before Gillian Flynn’s, even bigger selling, Gone Girl, 2012, the novel that, arguable, opened the publishing floodgates of the sub-genre.

Three Hours is definitely a thriller, but not of the psychological sort.  For one thing it lacks the single first-person unreliable narrator that is often a requirement of the sub-genre and no one has gone mysteriously missing, nor does a spouse or best friend turn out to be not who you thought they were.

This novel has similarities to Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes,2007, and, of course, We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2003, by Lionel Shriver, but with overtones of a Simon Kernick ‘race against the clock’ thriller.  One could probably find bits of Terry Hayes 2013’s, I am Pilgrim in here as well.

The story is compressed into the titular three hours and centres around the violent commandeering of a school in rural England.  Cliff Heights School is a small progressive private school with pupils ranging in age from four or five to teenage.  It’s comprised of several buildings spread out across a wooded campus.

 And it’s starting to snow, heavily.

The story moves around between quite few characters, some of whom presented in first-person and others in third-person limited.  There are also, as they often are these days, interjections in the form of text messages and snippets from on-line forums.

Although it’s all supposed to be occurring in real time, there is a lot of back story worked in.  This is achieved, mostly, through various character’s internal reminiscing.

One assumes the author’s decision to spread the story out across so many characters was, in part, to accommodate the number of issues she has on the go here.  While this helps the sub-plots, particularly the important refugee one, it can’t help but somewhat diffuse the tension.  The author, at times, has to figuratively ‘rev the engine’ a bit to get the thriller part of this back up to speed.

My impression was that as a thriller, this might have been better served by reducing the narration to two or three characters.  Still and all, Rosamund Lupton is an experienced writer, good enough to keep the reader engaged and turning the pages.

Published in paperback by Penguin at £8.99 in the UK, not yet available in the USA