Hey, it's MPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I love a book with an unreliable narrator,

especially when they're written well enough that I'm fooled into buying the narrator's side of the

story. Thriller author Paul Hawkins is no stranger to unreliable narrators. Her latest novel is

The Blue Hour, and it's about a recently deceased artist living

alone on a hard-to-reach island. And like any good thriller, as the book unfolds, so do secrets and

lies. In this interview with Here and Now is Deborah Becker, Hawkins talks about how she's fascinated

by the stories we tell ourselves, and we all are in some ways unreliable

narrators of our own lives. That's coming up. In the U.S., national security news can feel

far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

The writer Paula Hawkins is perhaps best known for her 2015 thriller The Girl on the Train,

which was adapted into the hit film starring Emily Blunt. Her new book is also a thriller,

set on a remote Scottish island called Aris. Though it's the idyllic backdrop for a reclusive artist, it's also the setting for secrets, lies, the dark side of people, and murder. The book is called The Blue Hour, and Paula Hawkins joins us to talk about it. Welcome. Thank you very much. Great to be here. So your novel centers around Vanessa Chapman, an artist who made heiress, the island, her home.

She's just died, but a piece of art that she left behind has raised some questions because it

contains a bone that might be human. Where did this idea come from? Well, I knew I wanted to

write about an artist, and I knew the setting,

I knew the island, but I needed something to get this plot moving. And I had this idea that

Vanessa would make art from things that she found while she was walking on her island or on the beach

or what have you. And I had read an article about how deer's ribs and human bones are often

mistaken. People think they've found human remains when actually it's a deer's rib, because

...