Not just dark, not just quiet, but different. The location and the predominantly night-set story combine to weave a hypnotic, haunting spell. James understands the power of the perfect setting: liminal spaces like rundown highway motels are inherently spooky, just the sort of place where you’d expect to find ghosts and bloody violence. James thriller, where the (unsettling, creepy) ghosts are secondary to some very real-world threats and the female protagonists are stubborn and driven.Īnd St. This is a story of darkness, violence, and obsession, of human monsters and supernatural warnings. James takes us from Viv’s 1982 to Carly’s 2017, giving voice to two very different young women connected by blood and a passion for both true crime and justice. How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you were - it could always be you. How it was always girls who ended up stripped and dead like roadkill. She thought about what it must be like to lie naked as the half-frozen rain pelted your helpless skin. They’d found her body two days after her parents reported her missing.Īs she sat in her car, twenty-year-old Viv Delaney’s hand shook as she listened to the story.

Eighteen years old, stripped naked and dumped in a ditch. A girl named Tracey Waters, last seen leaving a friend’s house in a neighboring town. A girl found in a ditch off Melborn Road, ten miles from here. “There are a lot of dead girls in Fell,” she’s told, but were those murders random, isolated crimes of passion? Or was there a serial killer at work in Fell? A killer who may have crossed paths with Viv Delaney? It becomes clear that there are longtime guests who never checked out.Īs Carly digs deeper into Fell’s past, frightening implications surface. Almost immediately, she begins to mirror Viv’s life, moving into her old apartment and working at the eerie Sun Down Motel, unchanged since 1982 and the last place anyone ever saw her.īut the Sun Down, it seems, isn’t quite as empty as it looks. Viv takes the night-shift job at the Sun Down Motel and soon realizes the motel-and Fell-are much darker and more dangerous than she expected.įell, New York, 2017: Twenty-year-old Carly Kirk has come to Fell to solve her family’s greatest mystery: the 1982 disappearance of her beautiful Aunt Viv. It’s a small, dark town, but that suits her well. James is an eery, spellbinding tale spanning two generations of women and centering on an Upstate New York motel where something hasn’t been right for a very long time.įell, New York, 1982: Twenty-year-old Viv Delaney leaves an unhappy home in Illinois for New York City but finds herself in Fell instead.

Simone st james the sundown motel