I’ll be honest—it took me a moment to understand this book. We are immediately thrown into an opulent “year-turning” party: buffets of food, swirling gowns, a mysterious grandfather clock slowly ticking down the hours until the new year. Our protagonist, Kembral Thorne, is at the party while on maternity leave from her job as a Hound, a police officer-esque position that specializes in retrieving people or objects from other dimensions known as Echoes. In rapid succession, author Melissa Caruso introduces Kembral and the rest of the guests at the year-turning party (including Kembral’s nemesis and obsession, professional thief Rika Nonesuch), the framework of Echoes and a series of specialized terms for the world and its sociopolitical system. If reading this paragraph was overwhelming, you can expect a similar reaction when you begin The Last Hour Between Worlds.
But—but! If you’re a fantasy romance fan who’s been craving originality from the genre, this book is truly a breath of fresh air. Once you’ve gotten the gist of Echoes and more or less familiarized yourself with the characters, the storyline is a heady, bizarre rush of murder mystery meets Alice in Wonderland. Kembral discovers quite quickly that the year-turning party is being used as a chessboard of sorts, that a game is being played out between powerful interdimensional beings. Every hour, the party falls into a weirder, deadlier Echo, and it is up to Kembral and Rika to figure out how to stop the game before they’re trapped in an Echo they can’t escape from—if they don’t, everyone will die.
Caruso has created a compelling heroine in Kembral, who is equal parts tough, resourceful and vulnerable. A full-blown adult and mother, there’s an element of maturity and caution to her perspective that is refreshing in a genre that is often full of young protagonists who dive headlong into peril. The heart of the novel is Kembral’s relationship with Rika: their history and their secrets, how they’ve leaned on each other and how they’ve hurt each other. Caruso’s writing is stunning as well, with lines like “trying to figure her out was like trying to hold the shape of fire in your mind.” Although I was skeptical when I started, by the middle, I was completely on board with Kembral and Rika as they tried to save their sinking ship—or, in this case, their dimension-bending party. The Last Hour Between Worlds isn’t a breezy read, but it will stretch your imagination and leave you thinking.