The Hotel by the Lake

Some guests leave their name. Others leave a secret.

The email arrives at nine minutes past nine, and it is not for her.

A lawyer in Geneva has copied an old address, and Viviane Laurent — who has run the grand hotel on the lake for eleven years — reads a chain of eleven messages from the bottom and learns what is about to happen to the building she has spent her adult life keeping open.

Alexander Keller arrives four days later on the bus, with one bag, and does not announce himself. He is there for the fund. His job is to value the place accurately, which is easier if he never once sits in room 11 with a cup of tea, because the moment he does, the report stops being about a building and starts being about people.

He sits in room 11 in the first week. And in the papers Viviane has never had a reason to open, there is something about her great-grandmother that the hotel has been keeping quiet for eighty years.

A romantic mystery set on an Alpine lake in the last full summer of a grand old hotel, about inherited silence, and the difference between what a place is worth and what it is for.