Reading: THE SUN DOWN MOTEL - Simone St. James

Harder and harder as it gets to find a thriller that lives up to its marketing, The Sun Down Motel - though technically not a thriller - is a breath of fresh air that is an engrossing, often creepy mystery that gets under your skin and tries to stay there. Flipping back and forth between two timelines, readers learn upfront that in 1982 a young woman named Viv Delaney, working the overnight shift at the rundown Sun Down Motel in upstate Fell, New York, mysteriously disappeared in the middle of her shift, leaving purse, coat and even keys behind, her body never found. Flash forward to 2017, when college student Carly Kirk arrives in Fell. Carly, who's always had an obsession for true crime stories anyway, is more obsessed than ever with this one because Viv Delaney was her aunt; Carly's mother, who'd been haunted her entire life over the disappearance of her older sister Viv, died without answers and unable to even talk about her sibling. So Carly is in town to find answers, her search leading to the Sun Down Motel, where she finds herself taking on the same overnight shift her aunt worked 35 years ago. Eerily, virtually nothing has changed at the Sun Down in the three-plus decades; not the decor, the old-school multi-line office phone or sign-in guestbook ... not, as Carly sooner learns, even the ghosts. This genuinely creepy novel moves back and forth between 1982 and 2017, detailing what happened to Viv Delaney even as we also watch Carly unknowingly travel down a very similar path in trying to find the truth. A couple of very cool plot twists/surprises make good on the promise of the an awesome premise, and while I would have liked just a bit more punch to the very end of the tale, The Sun Down Motel is still one of the most engaging, "skin-crawliest" supernatural suspense stories I've read in a very long time.  4.5/5 stars