Martha Grimes's Hotel Paradise was hailed by Booklist as "superb...beyond genre...one of the year's best." Now, Grimes returns to the same small town, intertwining the threads of one young girl's unexplained death with another young girl's attempt at making sense of her own life.

For waitress and cub reporter Emma Graham, tragedy defines where she lives. Spirit Lake, La Porte, and Lake Noir have been held in thrall by intertwined crimes: the murders of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose Queen, and Fern Queen; the supposed kidnapping of a four-month-old baby from the Belle Ruin hotel twenty years previously; and, most recently, the attack on Emma. And with the arrival of an unexpected visitor and a drifter, it looks like the bad times...