(2005)

When twelve-year-old Emma Graham, a waitress at her mother’s decaying resort hotel and now the youngest cub reporter in the history of La Porte’s Conservative newspaper, discovers the crumbling shell of a fabulous hotel hidden in the woods near her small town of Spirit Lake, she never imagines that the mysteries it holds will bring her one step closer to solving a forty-year-old crime – and force a new transgression to light. The sumptuous Belle Rouen, with its ornate public rooms, two golf courses, and grand ballroom, was the place to be each Saturday night until it burned to the ground before Emma’s birth. With a collection of singular characters helping her along, Emma is determined to discover the buried family secrets that lie just beyond the tree line in Cold Flat Junction, “where all mysteries,” says Emma, “begin and end.”

Highlighting Martha Grimes’s extraordinary range and depth, Belle Ruin is a fitting follow-up to the acclaimed Hotel Paradise and Cold Flat Junction that will continue to enchant readers who avidly follow the adventures of intuitive, calculating, and irrepressible Emma Graham.