At the Silver Spur Lodge & Casino, Elba Thomlison keeps everything running exactly as it should. Registration cards filed correctly. Complaints resolved before they become stories. Nothing left to chance, nothing left unread. When a guest is found dead in her room, Elba is the one who makes sure the hotel survives the morning.
Michael Dolan doesn't believe in coincidence. A retired FBI agent working as a house detective for a small consortium of Nevada hotels, he has one method and it has never failed him: read the sequence of events in the order they actually happened, not the order they were reported. When a second guest dies under circumstances too similar to ignore, Dolan starts pulling records - registration cards, key logs, housekeeping schedules - certain the answer is institutional. A cover-up. A pattern too large for one person.
He is right about the pattern. He is wrong about almost everything else.
Guest Relations is a slow-burn psychological thriller about two people who solve problems for a living - one by controlling every variable in a life that was once entirely out of her control, the other by refusing to believe anything until the evidence forces him to. As Dolan's investigation closes in and Elba's own composure begins, for the first time, to crack, the novel asks what happens when the system someone built to protect themselves finally meets a case it was never designed to survive.
Restrained, precise, and quietly devastating, Guest Relations is for readers of character-driven psychological suspense who want their thrillers to earn the twist rather than announce it.
Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.
Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.
He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.
These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.
