Book Review: The Deciding Hour

Reviewed by Lindsay Crandall

A fast-paced thriller that tests the limits of friendship and faith

Returning home from a summer vacation in Acapulco, six lifelong friends end up caught in a vicious storm. Unable to continue driving, they seek shelter at a hotel that seems to appear from nowhere. 

Once they find their room, they quickly learn that this is no ordinary hotel. Rather, it’s a place where the choices and decisions made throughout each of their lives come back to haunt them. It soon becomes apparent that a gaming system, supplied by the hotel and controlled by an unknown entity, is their only means of escaping this hotel, and so the Deciding Hour begins.

Each player is forced to take their turn confronting their own personal choices and actions throughout their lives, revealing truths they’ve kept hidden from everyone, including each other. Their movements are dictated by the game and the creatures they encounter.  Their fate is determined by the answers and explanations they provide. Fasan writes, “…their souls somehow left their bodies and were transported to another dimension.  Their second chance at life had come from within…” Each player is given “one last chance to do the right thing and get a second chance at life, to do things differently.”

Fasan has created a strong cast of characters here, infusing each with their own distinctive personalities and traits. He does a wonderful job of highlighting the intricacies and complications within these relationships. Each boy relates to the group in a unique way and Fasan explores this by utilizing scenes from the past. The prose is wonderfully descriptive and colors individual stories with desperation and determination as each player moves through their own personal level of the game.  

The story comes to its own natural conclusion, but Fasan extends the story for several more chapters, allowing readers a glimpse into what each character’s life looks like years after the event. This provides an extra opportunity to add to each character’s individual story and how the game continues to affect them as they continue in the wake of the revelations they were forced to make to survive the game.

The Deciding Hour is a fast-paced thriller with intricate layers and an eclectic cast. It highlights the secrets and lies that are kept and told, even among the closest of friends, and how those choices and decisions affect us in the end.

Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Print Length: 306 pages

ISBN: 979-8218150679

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Thank you for reading Lindsay Crandall’s book review of The Deciding Hour by Jerrod O. Fasan! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.