Emma Graham is quizzical and persuasive, imaginative and pragmatic, shy and belligerent. And curious--oh, so curious. The cat hasn't been born that could challenge Emma in that department. I can't let go of a thing--a puzzle, a person, a place. Once it gets my attention, I have to keep worrying it until it comes clear. I have to hang on, and it makes life really tiring. I work on these questions down in the Pink Elephant, a small chilly room which was once used for cocktail parties underneath the hotel dining room. The room's cold stone walls are painted pink, and there's a long wooden picnic bench and hurricane lamps. The candles give the room atmosphere. Cobwebs and dust and ghosts help too. Wrestling with quandaries small and large--there's nothing like it to lift a 12-year-old girl from the humdrum vagaries of life in La Porte, a small resort town whose crown jewel, the Hotel Paradise, is drifting into threadbare but dignified obscurity. Emma, who has lived at the hotel all her life (her mother is the hotel's cook), is a charming mix of David Copperfield, Scout Finch, Harriet the Spy, and Rudyard Kipling's mongoose, whose motto is "Go and Find Out." In Hotel Paradise, Emma tried to unravel the mystery surrounding the 40-year-old drowning death of young Mary- Evelyn Devereau. In Cold Flat Junction, that death takes on new resonance with the murder of Fern Queen. Fern was the daughter of Ben Queen and his wife Rose Devereau, Mary-Evelyn's aunt. Ben spent 20 years in prison for Rose's murder, and Fern's body is found just days after Ben is paroled.

Convinced of Ben's innocence, Emma sets out to track down the real killer. Her investigations mirror a delicate web of small-town relationships, expectations, and preconceptions. She slips through diners, garages, abandoned houses, and train stations, befriending taxi drivers, schoolteachers, and poachers: "You have to sneak up on what you want to know; you have to peek through windows at the facts so they won't run off and hide. You cannot go smashing through doors." When Emma looks through windows, she sees not only facts, but dreams, questions, and possibilities. Her quest is for answers, certainly, but also for her place in the world she interrogates so persistently.

Hotel Paradise was compared by certain readers to To Kill a Mockingbird and was in turn found wanting by some. Although both novels have powerfully personable preadolescent girls as protagonists, the comparison is perhaps less than just. Harper Lee's novel is rooted in the dust and grit of a particular time and place, and at least part of its power comes from its evocation of participation in or responsibility for that particularity. The Emma novels, however, are narrative tapestries with threads tantalizingly resistant to such grime. Their strength lies in the author's ability to slip the bonds of context; she has fashioned a shimmeringly lovely world that resists our impulse to categorize, to locate, to fix. --Kelly Flynn


From Publishers Weekly
Grimes made her reputation with her Richard Jury mysteries, but she has also successfully produced character-driven psychological fiction. This smartly written, quietly paced sequel to her 1996 hit Hotel Paradise revisits precocious 12-year-old sleuth Emma Graham, working in her family's fading resort hotel on Spirit Lake in smalltown America. Setting this narrative a week after the close of its predecessor, Grimes chronicles Emma's investigation of three family murders. Ben Queen has recently been released from prison after serving 20 years for the murder of his wife, Rose Devereau Queen. Fern Queen, Rose and Ben's daughter, who "had always been touched in the head," is found shot, and Ben is once again the prime suspect. Emma knows that Ben could not have committed either murder. Unfortunately, she can't tell the sheriff without letting on that Ben is hiding in the old Devereau house. Emma is aware that all these events began 40 years ago with the mysterious drowning death of 12-year-old Mary-Evelyn Devereau, who was being cared for by her three aunts, Rose's half sisters. And who is the spectral "Girl" who keeps appearing and disappearing? Skillfully constructed as a smart, independent child learning to be a self-aware adult, Emma has a talent for indirect routes, self-fulfilling lies and pumping her unwitting sources for a great deal of information. Her meditations can occasionally make slow reading, and she tells her story in almost as roundabout a way as she investigates, but the effect is surprisingly satisfying. Like Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, Grimes obviously enjoys straying from more traditional mysteries, though under her own name. Fans of Grimes's Richard Jury series undoubtedly read her in both incarnations, and the sophisticated jacket design should help lure general readers to this well-wrought narrative. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The intrepid 12-year-old sleuth Emma Graham is back in a sequel to Grimes's Hotel Paradise. When 38-year-old Fern Queen is shot just days after her father, Ben, is released from prison, Sheriff Sam DeGheyn suspects him. Emma, certain that the current murder is somehow related to the drowning death of Fern's cousin Mary-Evelyn Devereau 40 years earlier, sets out to prove Ben Queen's innocence. While the mystery lacks both credibility and suspense, Emma's domestic life is entertaining. Left to run her family's hotel while her mother vacations in Florida, the plucky, philosophical Emma creates exotic drinks for her 91-year-old great-aunt, Aurora Paradise; reluctantly agrees to play the deus ex machina in her brother Will's offbeat production of Medea; and hides mushrooms in the meatloaf of the mean-spirited hotel patron, Miss Bertha. Recommended for public libraries. Jane la Plante, Minot State Univ., ND Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Catching the tone and attitudes of a 12-year old with an active fantasy life is no easy feat, but Bernadette Dunne has it down. Picking up from HOTEL PARADISE, this book finds Emma Graham continuing to indulge her curiosity about the events surrounding the drowning of a girl her own age. Dunne draws the listener into this "world according to Emma," emphasizing her fascination with words and her self-conscious perception of the world and the people around her. She portrays the eccentric supporting characters distinctively, illuminating their personalities and sometimes unique brands of humor. Dunne finds a nice, even pace that keeps both Emma and the plot moving. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Grimes, best known for the popular Richard Jury mysteries, crossed over into serious fiction with Hotel Paradise (1996), jumping off from crime detection into an exploration of character (ranging from quirky through bizarre), locale (Grimes presents us with a down-at-heels resort town), and meaning (from a persistently curious 12-year-old girl's perspective). Although the rundown Hotel Paradise, where preadolescent Emma Graham lives with her family, and the town of Cold Flat Junction aren't specified as southern, the feel of the novel, in its meandering obsession with the past, is definitely southern gothic. Cold Flat Junction picks up where Hotel Paradise left off--Emma still puzzles over the local family that has produced three murders in the past 40 years, starting with the drowning death of another adolescent girl, and continuing into the present with the shooting death of still another young girl. The intriguing element here is not the murders themselves, nor the suspects, but the way Emma's mind works, worrying and picking over details of the town that the locals have long since given up on. Clear-eyed Emma tells her own story, sounding a bit like Huck Finn (the voice slips sometimes, though, when Emma sounds too sophisticated or literate for even the most precocious preteen). Listening to Emma grope for understanding in this most tangled town is fascinating, and watching as the seemingly unconnected bits come together is unnerving. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Obsessed with the "accidental" drowning of an adolescent girl some 40 long years ago, Emma Graham is determined to unravel the mystery of the drowning and the unsolved murders that wind back to it. But Emma's unstoppable quest for answers will take her to places no 12-year-old girl should go -- not even a child as daring, irrepressible, and intuitive as Emma. In the marvelously intriguing Cold Flat Junction, Martha Grimes's quirky, thoroughly captivating young heroine continues the pursuit she began in Hotel Paradise -- tracking down old secrets in the cobwebbed corners of a once-fashionable resort hotel in search of the long-buried truth about two mysterious deaths that will help her make sense of her own strange life.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Martha Grimes's Hotel Paradise was hailed by Booklist as "superb...beyond genre...one of the year's best." Now Grimes returns to the same small town, intertwining the threads of one young girl's unexplained death with another young girl's attempt at making sense of her own life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Grimes brings every corner of Cold Flat Junction to vivid life.

San Diego Union-Tribune

...a thoroughly delightful reading experience.

Baltimore Sun

Grimes brings every corner of Cold Flat Junction to vivid life.

Knoxville News-Sentinel

Though some may disbelieve Emma's intelligence as too adult, these are skills honed by solitary children. Grimes get that - and everything else - just right.

New York Times Book Review