The Sun Down Motel

Every faded small town has a place like the Sun Down Motel, and in Fell, New York, it is a low-slung roadside stop where travelers pass through and locals go to hide. In 1982, Viv Delaney takes the night-clerk shift to save money for a move to the city — and slowly realizes that the motel is haunted, both by something that walks its corridors after dark and by the unsolved deaths of several women in and around Fell. Then Viv vanishes without a trace.

Thirty-five years later, Viv's niece Carly Kirk, who grew up hearing about the aunt who disappeared, drops out of college and drives to Fell to find out what happened. She takes a room, takes the same graveyard shift at the same unchanged motel, and begins retracing Viv's steps — the guest ledger, the flickering lights, the doors that open on their own — until she is pulled toward the same secret, and the same danger, that swallowed her aunt.

Told across the two women's alternating timelines, Simone St. James's novel braids a genuine ghost story with a serial-killer mystery into an atmospheric, propulsive thriller about the women a town would rather forget.