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."