When the bodies of two teenage girls are discovered in a rundown New York City hotel room, Detective Maria Miller is called to the crime scene. The best friends were supposed to be at a sleepover miles away in the suburbs. With no record of the girls checking in and the room on the thirteenth floor closed off to guests, what were they doing there?

Sinister messages on their phones suggest the girls were lured to the hotel, using its reputation for hauntings as bait. The killer left no DNA behind and Maria’s efforts to trace their identity leads to a dead end. But Maria feels certain the murderer works at the hotel. How else did they access the room and know it was empty?

While Maria races to interview staff before another body turns up, the hotel manager shares an old newspaper article about an identical double murder decades before. Could the cases be linked? After a key suspect is found dead in his home, a discovery in the hotel room sends shivers down Maria’s spine. Can she uncover the secrets of the room on the thirteenth floor before she becomes its next victim?

Kindle | 35 Chapters | 250 Pages | On & Off Reading – Several Days

June reading has been so lacklustre because life has been so busy and stressful. I’m well behind on my reading goal for this year but even I have to admit that there are times where life comes before reading.

June has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, and I haven’t been sleeping well, neither of which are beneficial for reading. However, I have managed a moment to myself in which to read this book which is the third in a series. I read this in segments rather than in one and I think that helped me to overcome my lack of reading and allowed me to more fully transport myself inside this book.

This is, as I said, the third book in the Maria Miller series by Helen Phifer. This series deals with the supernatural messing around crime. Think ghosts, spirts, demons, cults, murders etc.

This book takes place in a hotel, the Parker hotel and the entity involved stays mysterious for most of the book. There was, I felt, a definite shift in this book. The main characters, Maria and Frankie have evolved past their characters of book one and have almost become different characters because of it. I could sense while reading that this book would be a turning point of the series, and while I do not know the next destination, I believe it will follow a path that will allow the characters to further their evolution.

There were, I felt, a lot more characters in this plot than the previous books. It was more expansive in a way and added more to the read in terms of giving the reader a wider pool of characters to pull theories from.

This plot was vaguer on the culprit. In the previous two books there was a definite tying up of all loose ends but at the end of this book, once the climax had happened, I was still unsure on how the entity had appeared, why they’d appeared, and where they’d come from. It isn’t something that negatively impacted my reading, but it was something that I wanted answers to and was left short changed.

Helen Phifer’s writing is something that I greatly enjoy, I feel at home when I read her books. I can see big things on the horizon for Maria Miller, and while only Phifer knows where the series will go, I find myself rather excited for a different tone of book. I find sometimes that series with beloved characters can get a little boring or feel too similar, so if the ending of this book is indeed suggesting a change, I am only too willing to read it.

I would say this book has the more open-minded entity storyline than the first two books where the entity was more focused, and plot driven. I think the characters were more at the forefront of the plot, which with a suggested turning point seemed more beneficial.