They definitely ate well in this one.

54. Hotel Paradise – Martha Grimes

In Hotel Paradise, the narrator has family around, but is basically seen as underfoot if she isn’t doing her job at the resort, serving her mother’s food to the guests. She becomes obsessed with the death of another 12 year old in the area 40 years earlier and spends the story unraveling what really happened, while also providing a carefully drawn picture of the area she’s in and the people who inhabit it with their weird proclivities and willingness to live in a dying resort town. There were several mentions of tomato aspic. Aspic to me is one of the more confusing things anyone has ever tried to eat, perhaps that’s not a true mystery, but I digress.

The ending isn’t very neat and tidy, and that may have a lot to do with this being the first book in a series. I didn’t know if was part of a series when I read it, so, it just seemed familiar to me as someone else who had to create and solve their own mysteries because no one else was around.

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After Merricat passed, Peregrine got choosier about her friend-pigs, and maybe indulged her investigative streak a little more dangerously than one would expect.