Okay, technically, I don’t love Simone St. James, at least not on a personal level. Although she seems pleasant enough online, I’ve never met her and know nothing about her. I just love a number of her books, and it makes sense to group them all into one post.

Her first five books, of which I’ve read four*, are set in the 1920s. I read the first one, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, a few years ago now, and while it was okay, it didn’t grab me. I don’t remember why, so take that with a grain of salt. (I should probably re-read it.) I got hooked when I read her most recent, The Sun Down Motel.

In 2017, a woman goes to upstate New York** and takes a job at the run-down Sun Down Motel, where her aunt disappeared from in 1982. It’s not a spoiler to say the place is haunted, okay? But the haunting is…very, very well done. It’s sometimes subtle, it’s sometimes a returning guest…. I tore through it.

Then I read the book before that, The Broken Girls, which takes place in Vermont in 2014 and 1950. In this one, a woman tries to figure out what happened to her sister who was found dead on the grounds of a shuttered girls’ school twenty years ago. The girls’ school, as we learn from the 1950 sections, was a place for “girls whom no one wants.” I loved how these time periods interwove, and while Idlewild Hall is creepy as hell, I still want to go there and poke around.

Of the five, I’ve discussed one above and am waiting for another, my favorite was probably An Inquiry Into Love and Death because it was set in Cornwall, but honestly, I loved them all.

If you like strong women, creepy settings (with ghosts or similar paranormal activity), Simone St. James is your woman. Er, her books are for you.

1920s-set novels