They had menace but I didn’t know what the menace was. I started off preferring Carly’s segments because I found them harder to classify. The ‘didn’t want to look away’ statement turns out to be key to understanding Viv’s character and the intent of the book. It wasn’t romantic but something about it fascinated her. A hard collision with life that she hadn’t known was possible in her soft cocoon. They weren’t people she would ever have talked to. These weren’t people suburban Viv Delaney would ever have seen in a hundred years. Those people never saw the people Viv saw: the cheating couples having affairs, the truckers strung out on whatever they took to stay awake, the women with blackened eyes who checked out at five A.M. The good people of Fell, whoever they were, were sound asleep at three A.M. ‘Night people were not the same as day people. Here’s a description of the impact on Viv who is away from home for the first time: I recognise that feeling of being surrounded by the world but not being in it because the rhythm of your life is different. I loved the descriptions of the detachment from reality that comes from working nights. Viv and Carly both find their perceptions altered by working the nightshift at the Sun Down Motel.

The men are almost all either threats or obstacles. In both timelines, all the main characters are women. Knowing Viv will disappear but not knowing why or how is a major driver of the tension in the book.

The two women differ in their attitudes, their motivation and the level of risk they’re willing to take. The 2017 timeline is told from the point of view of Viv Delaney’s niece, also twenty-something, who has taken a job at the motel to investigate her aunt’s disappearance. The 1982 timeline is told from the point of view of Viv Delaney, a twenty-something woman who takes a casual job in a strange town to fund her travel to New York and finds herself entangled in something strange. The rhythm of the story is set by switching the narrative between two timelines, thirty-five years apart, but with the action in both taking place in the Sun Down Motel, at the edge of the small town of Fell, New York. She’s written something that manages to be thought/anger-provoking, is driven by strong female characters and delivers a thriller/supernatural mystery that is tense and exciting. I was very impressed with what Simone St.

The sun down motel review