The Lion Hotel

Readers are transported to the historical town of Shrewsbury. The Lion Hotel provides the setting for a story in which a detective’s daughter is wrongly accused of a crime. One might have expected her father, Inspector Horace no less, to have easily been able to prove her innocence, but things never quite work out that way when you are a teenager. Fortunately, Florence is quite capable of remaining one step ahead of her father and the hotel staff. Florence’s predicament begins, in her mind, when she exclaims, ‘Father, I think we’re stuck. We’re not supposed to be in the same section of the revolving door,’ and ends with her reflecting upon a set of circumstances. During their time at the hotel, the family encounter all sorts of strange behaviour, including that shown by a waiter obsessed with Charles Dickens, who makes himself a suspect too. Philip Jones’s refreshingly different writing style combines history with witty and engaging dialogue to bring the characters to life and allow the reader to imagine the whole situation unravelling in front of them.