A once fashionable, now fading resort hotel. A spinster aunt living in the attic. A house full of secrets and dusty furnishings, uninhabited for almost fifty years. A neglected lake, covered with water lilies. Pettiness and cruelty in small-town America. And Emma Graham, a twelve-year-old girl with a passion for double-chocolate ice-cream sodas and decaying lakefronts, and an obsession with the death of another girl - Mary-Evelyn Devereau - forty years earlier. COLD FLAT JUNCTION is the sequel to Martha Grimes' HOTEL PARADISE and in it Emma Graham continues to look for answers surrounding the fate of Mary-Evelyn, who was also twelve when she drowned in Spirit Lake. And the murder of Fern Queen remains to be solved. COLD FLAT JUNCTION is a delicate yet excruciating view of the decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult, and a novel with extraordinary range and depth.