Martha Grimes -- Hotel Paradise

Martha Grimes: Hotel Paradise

July, 2011

Awards:

Nero Wolfe Award for best mystery of the year, the Wolfe Pack, 1983, for The Anodyne Necklace.

Personal Information:

Born 1931, in Pittsburgh, PA; daughter of D.W. (an attorney) and June (a hotel owner) Grimes; divorced; children: Kent Van Holland. Education: University of Maryland, B.A., M.A. Memberships: Authors Guild, Authors League of America. Addresses: Home: Silver Spring, MD; Santa Fe, NM; and Sarasota, FL. Office: Department of English, Montgomery College, Takoma and Fenton St., Takoma Park, MD 20012. E-mail: grimesinfo@plesser.com.

Career Information:

Educator and writer. University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, former English instructor; Frostburg State College, Frostburg, MD, former assistant professor of English; Montgomery College, Takoma Park, MD, professor of English, 1970

Hotel Paradise

A once-fashionable now fading resort hotel. A spinster aunt living in the 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.

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

“Although there were no murders and – alas! – no Sheriff DeGheyn, Hotel Paradise is otherwise the story of my 12-year-old life.” Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where her father was the City Solicitor), Martha Grimes spent every summer at her mother’s hotel in Western Maryland. Her favorite memories of that time are her mother’s cooking and her brother’s theatrical productions in the big garage behind the hotel to which she was rarely admitted.

The End of the Pier, Hotel Paradise, and Cold Flat Junction explore life in the town of LaPorte, frequently portraying it through the eyes of Emma Graham, a wise and curious twelve-year-old. Emma broods over the mystery of past murders in the town, but although there is a mysterious element to these stories, the focus is not on solving a puzzle, but rather on observing "the way Emma's mind works, worrying and picking over details," explained Connie Fletcher in Booklist. She found Cold Flat Junction both "fascinating" and "unnerving." Emma appears again in Belle Ruin. Here, the young detective investigates the burning of the hotel Belle Rouen and, in the process, uncovers a secret. "Emma's wry and often mature-for-her-age observations on human nature belie her young years, but make for joyful reading," according to Roz Shea on

Bookreporter.com

RECOMMENDED SIMILAR TITLES:

The Virgin of Small Plains--Nancy Pickard

Mystery Series:

Emma Graham series:

• Hotel Paradise (1996)
• Cold Flat Junction (2000)

The sequel to Hotel Paradise follows Emma Green on her continuing search for the truth, a journey that takes her to a resort hotel that is the scene of a series of unsolved murders that may be tied to the forty-year-old "accidental" drowning of a teenage girl.

• Belle Ruin (2005)

Discovering the crumbling remains of a once-fabulous hotel in the woods near her small home town, twelve-year-old cub reporter Emma Graham stumbles on clues pertaining to a forty-year unsolved crime involving deeply buried family secrets.

• Fadeaway Girl ( 2011) Latest Title

Emma Graham, amateur sleuth and cub reporter for the weekly Conservative newspaper, has survived an attempt on her life and solved one crime in Spirit Lake.

featuring Maud Chadwick (who is also a character in the Emma Graham Series)

• The End of the Pier (1993)

Maud Chadwick, a waitress at a cafe in a small town, struggles with her confusing emotions as she watches her son prepare to leave home, and turns to the town sheriff, Sam DeGheyn, as her only confidant.

Richard Jury Series

Andi Oliver series

Other:

• Send Bygraves (poetry), 1989.
• The End of the Pier (novel), 1992.
• Biting the Moon (novel), 1999.
• The Train Now Departing: Two Novellas (contains The Train Now Departing and When the Mousetrap Closes), 2000.
• Foul Matter (novel), 2003.
• Dakota, Viking (, 2008

Author’s web site:

http://www.marthagrimes.com/