Everything you need to understand or teach Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes.
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...