It's 1921, and Alice James, known as Nobody for her uncanny ability to continually reinvent herself while remaining almost totally forgettable, arrives complete with bullet wound in Portland, Ore., after fleeing some bloody history with the New York mob.

From international-bestselling, multi-award-nominated writer Lyndsay Faye, it's a masterwork of historical suspense.įaye (Jane Steele) takes a simultaneously exuberant and weighty approach to historical mystery in her memorable latest. To untangle the web of lies and misdeeds around her, Alice will have to answer for her own past, too.Ī richly imagined novel starring two indomitable heroines, The Paragon Hotel at once plumbs the darkest parts of America's past and the most redemptive facets of humanity. And only Alice and her new Paragon 'family' are searching for a missing mulatto child who has mysteriously vanished into the woods.

The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland in fearful numbers-burning crosses, electing officials, infiltrating newspapers, and brutalizing blacks. Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and the club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine, she understands their dread. But her unlikely sanctuary turns out to be an all-black hotel in a Jim Crow city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a white woman on the premises.Īs she meets the churlish Dr. She befriends Max, a black Pullman porter who reminds her achingly of home and who saves Alice by leading her to the Paragon Hotel. The year is 1921, and 'Nobody' Alice James has just arrived in Oregon with a bullet wound, a lifetime's experience battling the New York Mafia, and fifty thousand dollars in illicit cash. A gun moll with a knack for disappearing flees from Prohibition-era Harlem to Portland's Paragon Hotel.

The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye