Hotel Paradise, following up on Grimes's earlier The End of the Pier (1992), represents the author's second foray into serious, "literary" fiction, an intentional, self-conscious movement away from the tried-and-true conventions of the traditional mystery novel. Nonetheless, a possible murder does lie at the core of the plot and prompts the investigations of the book's first-person narrator, twelve-year-old Emma Graham (who remains unnamed until near the novel's end). Plucky and precocious Emma, whose harried, distant mother presides over a down-at-the-heels restaurant and hotel in the small town of LaPorte, learns of the mysterious drowning death, some forty years before, of young Mary-Evelyn Devereau.
Mary-Evelyn had lived with three elderly aunts and had apparently dressed herself.....
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