The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Murder at the Hotel Orient

Murder at the Hotel Orient

After some quite excellent forays into science fiction and fantasy recently, I decided that thematically it was time to get back to an old fashioned murder mystery. Murder at the Hotel Orient by Alessandra Ranelli, which, while set in the present day, uses its unique setting to harken back to a classic locked-room mystery.

Our novel is set at the Hotel Orient in Vienna, which is an infamous ā€œlove hotelā€ in both the story and apparently in real life as well. The hotel has a number of rules that promise to keep the anonymity of all their clientele, such as no cameras or cell phones and all check-ins are done under fake names. The person ruthlessly enforcing all these rules is the concierge, an American ex-pat with a troubled history and a number of tight corsets, by the name of Sterling Lockwood.

The story opens on an average winter evening in Vienna, with Sterling having to deal with a number of random inconveniences for the guests of the hotel, including a waylaid birthday cake and all of the landline phones ringing across the hotel. She also had to deal with the arrival of an ex of hers, whom she believed at the time was there ā€œworkingā€ with a client. By the time the next morning arrives, both her ex and her companion for the night are dead.

The rest of the book then proceeds with Sterling doing her best to help the Viennese detectives who are assigned to the case while still trying to maintain the privacy and secrecy that the Hotel Orient is known for. Overall Iā€™ll say that I enjoyed the book. Even though the case drags on for a number of days the story telling moves at a good pace and there are a sufficient number of twists and turns to keep the reader going. My main issue with the book though is tonally, itā€™s a bit all over the place. As the detectives are introduced to Sterling there is a lot of what is meant to be sexy back-and-forth with lots of innuendo, but itā€™s hard for me to really interpret if weā€™re supposed to be taking the exchanges as actual sexy banter, or more a kinky try-hard interjecting sex into a murder investigation. And while trying to be very sexy and transgressive, itā€™s honestly pretty tame in that regard. Other than the setting and involvement of sex workers, I donā€™t think it really gets above a PG-13 level in terms of content. This is a far cry from a lot of the incredibly smutty stuff that is very popular in booktok circles these days.

If you are looking for a more modern take on a locked-room murder mystery, in an interesting setting and you donā€™t mind hearing about the existence of sex, then I think this book is a winner.