Novels

Richard serves as proud hotel clerk to nineteenth-century Europe’s finest Grand Hotel. Loyal, punctilious, and old-fashioned, Richard’s tidy existence is cracked in two with the arrival of The Moon-Faced Man. The peculiar guest causes Richard to realize details of his past he can’t recollect: How long he’s worked at the hotel, how he got there in the first place … if his name is Richard at all.

 

The Moon-Faced Man leaves him with a quest, one penned onto parchment by the hotel’s absent Master: Seek out ten keys and their respective locks within the hotel’s forbidden southern wing and uncover the truth of his missing identity, all while saving his beloved hotel from an impending disaster. Rolled into the parchment: the first key.

 

Desperate to set his orderly world back to rights, Richard descends deep underground, where a crude imitation of the hotel lies buried and its long-dead patrons dwell. With The Moon-Faced Man serving as his ominous adviser, Richard finds himself caught in a sinister game that is far more personal than he was led to believe. In a place where reality peels as easily as the wallpaper, each key serves as a puzzle piece to a horrific past. Playing by the rules may very well restore order to the hotel, but to break the rules may be to uncover the hotel’s true nature, and save the forgotten souls of those Richard loved along the way.