Hotel Paradise - Hardcover

Grimes, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679441875 ISBN 13: 9780679441878

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

Internationally acclaimed Martha Grimes once again turns her hand to crafting a story of such rich atmosphere and intricate suspense that she transports the reader to a world unlike any other.

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.

With its narrative grace, its compelling characters, and its moment-to-moment suspense, Hotel Paradise is Martha Grimes at the top of her form.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Only the magnificent Martha Grimes could have written this book. Hotel Paradise is brilliantly rendered and superbly textured, yes -- but it is the amazing voice of a wonderful girl that provides such unique narrative force and lyrical beauty. If this book is a "mystery," it's the mystery of life itself. As a reader, I was enthralled. As a writer, I was struck mute with jealousy."
-- Andrew Vachss

"Hotel Paradise is a remarkable achievement. Every word is alive, redolent with beauty and surprise and the promise of revelations to come. The story is the rarest kind of mystery -- one that's built out of secret thoughts and feelings we instantly recognize as true to real people who live in the world we know. When I turned the last page I wanted to find that I had only imagined it was over."
-- Thomas Perry

"The originality here -- the convention of a radically disempowered detective set against a densely imagined but indifferent world -- will remind some readers of Barbara Vine, others of the Henry James of "In the Cage" and The Awkward Age. It shows off Grimes's gifts for extravagant digression beautifully."
-- Kirkus Reviews

From the Back Cover:

A neglected lake, covered with water lilies. A once fashionable, now faded resort. A derelict house full of secrets, uninhabited for almost half a century. The death of a twelve-year-old girl forty years in the past. And another girl who becomes obsessed with this death. With her knack for encouraging adults to reminisce, she begins to piece together puzzles from the past and present.

HOTEL PARADISE is a delicate yet disturbing view of the decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult...and the choices she must make between right and wrong, love and truth, life and death. With its narrative grace, compelling characters, and intricate suspense, HOTEL PARADISE is Martha Grimes at the top of her form.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679441875
• ISBN 13: 9780679441878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 347