Hotel Destiny A Ghost Noir by Raymond Benson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and Crossroad Press for providing me with a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review! It shall be releasing on the 15th of September, 2020.
When asked, due to the many deaths and murders that have transpired there, if the hotel is haunted, Trent laughs and answers, “I hope so! That will add to its mystique!”
Hotel Destiny, once a lavish hotel fit for the likes of Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini, has suffered much through its time and is now set to become as grand as it once was. The only problem? There is a murderer that has targeted the hotel several times throughout the past few years, which doesn’t paint Cole, cynical hotel detective, in a particularly competent light. He couldn’t solve the murders in life but perhaps as the latest victim, he can solve them in death.
You read that right. Our main character is a ghost. And don’t you worry, that isn’t a spoiler. It is right in the blurb and goodness I’m glad it is, otherwise this book would be impossible to review without spoilers and boy howdy would that make this difficult for me. In Cole we have a flawed character to adapt to the afterlife with and attempt to solve those murders with. Unfortunately this book isn’t without its own flaws, but we will get to those later.
As always, lets start with characters. There are may we will meet in our journey, but the one we will become most familiar with is of course the main character Cole, who we follow throughout the entire story. He is a deeply flawed man with a checkered past, and getting to discover it as he faces his demons is a fun experience. The unique twist here is that, for the majority of the book, he’s dead, so rooting for a happy ending is made more complicated. My biggest issue with him is that he could be frustratingly oblivious when presented with important evidence. I feel like that really dragged out revelations unnecessarily.
Hotel Destiny is probably 85% of the setting in the book named for it. This too is provided with a fresh twist, as Cole can explore different points in the hotel’s history, allowing him to piece together clues. And these time jumps are broken up with trips into Cole’s own memories, so it doesn’t become dull. Agnieszka was an interesting resident of the hotel that I enjoyed encountering.
This book was not without issues. I already touched on Cole’s occasional cluelessness that did begin grating on me. Sometimes the rules of the afterlife could be inconsistent and confusing. For example, in some of his memories Cole has zero control over his body, and in others he is able to act of his own accord.
The more I read, the more I encountered repetition in the exposition. In order to orient you in whatever decade you’ve landed in, information you’ve already received would be given again. It didn’t happen so much that it became super frustrating, but I certainly noticed it.
This is a personal pet peeve for me, so it mightn’t bother everyone, but the amount of exclamation points in the narration really irked me. It is part of the reason I can’t love Matthew Reilly’s work, and it bothered me here too. In dialogue it is perfectly fine, but I feel as if narration shouldn’t need exclamation points to emphasise things.
Despite these issues, and the fact that I figured out most of the plot twist early on, I did mostly enjoy my stay at Hotel Destiny. One thing I would like to say is that, if you’re a seasoned horror enthusiast, you might not find what you’re looking for there. I feel this falls solidly into the realm of murder mystery that happens to feature ghosts. If that sounds appealing to you, then give Hotel Destiny a go when it releases on the 15th of September, 2020.
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Rebecka O'Malley 
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