The Hotel Marlowe's Winter

About this book:

The wind off the Atlantic doesn't just blow through Cape May—it haunts it. In the winter of 1984, architectural conservator Julian Croft is hired to survey the Hotel Marlowe, a rotting Gilded Age monument slated for demolition. But beneath the floorboards of Room 204, he finds a coronation tin sealed with thirty-year-old electrical tape. Inside: twenty-four unsent letters, written in blue ink on onionskin paper, chronicling a summer romance between the hotel owner's daughter and a beach boy in 1954. A love affair that crossed every line of class and power. A secret someone went to extraordinary lengths to bury.

As Julian fights the town council to save the building, the letters pull him deeper into the Marlowe's final season. Each chapter peels back another layer: a father's ruthless ambition, a manager's cold surveillance, a storm that changed everything. The hotel's decaying grandeur becomes a character itself—its sagging verandas and salt-crusted windows holding memories that refuse to stay silent. With developers circling and the ocean rising, Julian races to reconstruct a truth that someone killed to keep hidden.

Atmospheric and taut, *The Hotel Marlowe's Winter* is a literary mystery where architecture is archaeology, and every creaking floorboard whispers a name. For readers who love the gothic suspense of Daphne du Maurier, the historical texture of Kate Morton, and the haunting sense of place in *The Shadow of the Wind*—this is a story about what buildings remember, what the ocean keeps, and what happens when the past refuses to stay buried.