The Sun Down Motel

November 18, 2019
In this engrossing supernatural thriller from St. 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. 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. It’s a puzzle her aunt may also have been trying to solve. St. 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. Suspense mounts as both characters put themselves in peril. Though the story’s spectral aspects may strike some as heavy-handed, there’s no doubt about the shocking, satisfying denouement. Horror fans will also want to check this one out. Agent: Pamela Hopkins, Hopkins Literary Assoc.

Starred review from January 1, 2020
St. James' previous thriller, The Broken Girls (2018), took place largely in a forbidding boarding school. This time the author's imagination takes readers to the run-down, barely-hanging-on Sun Down Motel in upstate New York, and the fear ramps way up. Carly Kirk's aunt, Viv Delaney, disappeared from the small town in 1982, and Carly is determined to find out what happened to her, going so far as to move to the town and take the same job as the long-gone woman, night clerk at the motel. Viv took the job to save enough money to move to New York City, but she never made it. What follows is a truly nightmarish trip back and forth in time and into the supernatural, as Viv in 1982 and Carly in 2017 try to find out who is killing local girls, crimes that the police have largely given up on solving. While Carly's quest benefits from a couple of overly lucky breaks, this terrifying story is guaranteed to keep readers rapt. Booktalk this one to your mystery-loving readers until you run out of superlatives. What a story!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)