Summary from GoodReads:

A once-fashionable, now fading resort hotel. A spinster Aunt living in an attic. Dirt roads that lead to dead ends. A house full of secrets and old, dusty furnishings, uninhabited for almost half a century. A twelve-year-old girl with a passion for double-chocolate ice-cream sodas, and decaying lake-fronts, and an obsession with the death by drowning of another young girl, forty years before.

Like all important events in the past, there are repercussions and ramifications in the present. In the world as seen by Martha Grimes, those repercussions simmer and seethe and wind their way through hearts and souls. The ramifications can be subtle. Or exhilarating. Passionate. And they can also be deadly.

Hotel Paradise is a delicate yet excruciating view of the pettiness and cruelty of small town America. It is a look at the difficult decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult and the choices she must make between right and wrong, between love and truth, between life and death. It is a novel with extraordinary range and depth that ultimately becomes a thrilling morality play.

My Review:

I am trying to figure out why I chose this book to read, why I requested it from the library and brought it home but I just can’t remember.  That said, I’m glad I did because I did enjoy the story.

This book is a reminder of what a good mystery is supposed to be like.  Filled with memories of better days gone by, perfect descriptions of food, people and places and enough of a touch of the mystery (and a super cute mystery solver) to keep the reader guessing and trying to figure out the story.

I’m not a big fan of “who done it” mysteries, I like my mysteries to have a gradual unfolding of a story, the story being the mystery itself instead of some huge unveiling “shock factor” type ending – and that’s what I got with this book.

I’d never heard of Martha Grimes before, but I’m glad I followed whatever impulse made me pick Hotel Paradise up and I plan to check out more of Grimes works in the near future.

Check out these review(s):

Elderly Thespian