The Best Book I Read This Month: The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James

The best book I read this month was the latest by Simone St. James. St. James has become an auto-buy author for me. The Sun Down Motel blew me away. Broken Girls broke my heart. And while The Book of Cold Cases didn’t have the same powerful effect on me, it did capture my attention and hold my interest.

Like St. James’s other books, The Book of Cold Cases is part mystery, part ghost story. A small town socialite has long been the suspect in a 1970s murder spree. In 2017, a crime blogger sets out to find the truth of what happened. The story is told in dual timelines, so we get both perspectives—the socialite and the crime blogger, the past and the present.

Maybe because I am familiar with St. James’s work, I saw the twist coming and accurately predicted a couple of other plot points, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the ride. I found Beth, the socialite, an interesting and complex character, and I enjoyed the layers of her story more than crime blogger Shea’s.

I don’t know if this is a book I would want to read again, but I am glad I was able to escape into it for a while.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

I read some very good books this month, but the best of them was The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James. The story is a dual timeline ghost story/murder mystery. A while back, I read and reviewed another book by St. James—The Haunting of Maddy Clare—and this one is so much better. It’s clear that St. James has grown as a writer and honed her craft.

The Sun Down Motel tells the story of two young women, Vivian Delaney in 1982 and her niece, Carly Kirk, in 2017. Viv disappeared in 1982 while working the night shift at the Sun Down Motel in a small town called Fell, NY. Thirty-five years later, Carly is determined to find out what happened to her.

Not much happens in the first six pages—it’s just Viv sitting in her car—but it was some of the spookiest writing I’ve ever read. I’ve been working on a spooky story myself, and I reread those first six pages multiple times as a master class. The rest of the book isn’t as spooky, even with the ghosts that populate it, but it is gripping and a very solid mystery. (Two mysteries, actually, but I don’t want to spoil anything.)

With this book, Simone St. James became one of my favorite writers, and I’ve added two more of her books to my TBR (to be read) list.