It’s hot and steamy in the summertime in Alabama, even on top of a mountain, at an exclusive resort hotel for the rich and famous. Fifteen year-old Sophie Franklin doesn’t know what to expect when she arrives there with her family, from New York, in the summer of 1892. But what she finds, beside the opulent Hotel Monte Sano, are a handsome stable boy named Jude who just may turn out to be the first true love of her life and his African American friend Smokey who knows more about what goes on at the hotel than anyone else. And a butchered man, bleeding to death under the hotel’s boardwalk! Shocked and afraid, Sophie’s mother wants to pack the family back to New York. So Sophie can stay, she and Jude and Smokey set out to find the murderer. But what they find is a Gothic maze of Jim Crow bigots, Yankee carpetbaggers, pistol-packing gamblers, menacing ghosts, and revenge seekers determined to settle a Civil War grudge not so long since passed. The Hotel Monte Sano is a fast paced mystery set in a fascinating fin de siècle world of ambition and decadence—when love, at least for the moment, eclipses the mounting tensions between rich and poor, black and white, and North and South.