When twelve-year-old Emma Graham, a waitress at her motherβs decaying resort hotel and now the youngest cub reporter in the history of La Porteβs 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 crimeβand 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 Emmaβs 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."
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