Agent: Pamela Hopkins, Hopkins Literary Assoc. Horror fans will also want to check this one out. Though the story’s spectral aspects may strike some as heavy-handed, there’s no doubt about the shocking, satisfying denouement.

Her detective work takes her to the sleepy backwater town of Fell, New York. Suspense mounts as both characters put themselves in peril. Carly is a young woman on the hunt for her aunt, who went missing a few decades ago. James approaches the chilling central conundrum from dual directions, alternating stretches of Carly’s investigation with flashbacks to Viv’s nightmarish experiences at the haunted motel. It’s a puzzle her aunt may also have been trying to solve. Every small town like Fell, New York, has a place like the Sun Down Motel. What Carly discovers fairly rapidly in decaying Fell, N.Y., where she signs on for the not surprisingly vacant graveyard slot at the spooky Sun Down Motel, is that she may be tackling a much bigger mystery-the never-solved cluster of murders of local young women preceding Viv’s disappearance. The secrets lurking in a rundown roadside motel ensnare a young woman, just as they did her aunt thirty-five years before, in this new atmospheric suspense novel from the national bestselling and award-winning author of The Broken Girls. James ( The Broken Girls), 20-year-old Carly Kirk sets out from her Illinois hometown determined to find some answers 35 years after her aunt Viv Delaney vanished while working the night shift at a seedy upstate New York motel.

In this engrossing supernatural thriller from St.

The sundown motel simone st james