Okay, so the bad first: James SUCKS at drawing out suspense. In the process, she becomes a night clerk at the Sun Down Motel herself, meeting a mysterious guest by the name of Nick Harkness. She’s going to retrace her aunt’s last known footsteps in an effort to discover what happened to Viv. She drops out of college and on impulse decides to travel to Fell herself. The motel is clearly haunted – and Viv exerts herself to find out what happened there.ģ5 years later in 2017, her twenty-year-old niece Carly is haunted by the mystery of what happened to the aunt her mother always refused to discuss, even before her death. She can smell the cigarette of an invisible smoker, see a boy run away from her when the motel should be empty, hear the screams of a woman who tells her to run. All she has to do is stay in the office overnight and give people the keys when they come to check in.īut Viv quickly discovers there’s a reason why Janice was so eager to offload all the responsibility onto her. But Viv is desperate, and the motel owner Janice is willing to pay her in cash if she becomes the night clerk. It’s a crumbling, barely profitable business from the 1950s-60s, whose main source of revenue is from prostitutes, drug dealers, and adulterers. She hitchhikes a ride (nearly ending up as just another statistic in the process) and is set down in front of the Sun Down Motel.

Twenty-year-old Vivian Delaney has just run away from her stifling existence at home, with an overprotective mother and perfect younger sister. It’s a shame that while James is great at creating a suitable atmosphere for the novel, she’s not so great at delivering on it.įell, upstate New York. While it delivered ghostliness in spades, it was remarkably clichéd, and I saw the answer to the mystery from miles away.

One rainy, overcast day, I was in the mood for a touch of mystery and ghostliness, so I dug this ARC up on my Kindle and dusted it off. But something isn’t right at the Sun Down, and before long she’s determined to uncover all of the secrets hidden…ĪRC received in exchange for an honest review – thank you! Viv Delaney works as the night clerk to pay for her move to New York City. Some are locals, trying to hide their secrets. Some customers are from out of town, passing through on their way to someplace better. Every small town like Fell, New York, has a place like the Sun Down Motel.

The sun down motel review