Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Stephanie Wrobel

Mystery readers know that it’s never a good idea for friends to get together for a reunion years after they’ve gone their separate ways.  No matter how strong the bonds were years earlier, too much has happened since then for the get-together to be successful.

A case in point is when six college friends meet sixteen years after graduation.  Well, it was graduation for five of the six, but that information comes later.

Alfred Smettle is now the owner of the Hitchcock Hotel, a rather grotesque mansion in the same New Hampshire town where the group attended Reville College.  He’s invited the five college friends he was closest to for a weekend at the Hotel as his guests.  During their times at Reville, all six were interested in cinema, none more so than Alfred.

You might almost call him a fanatic about classic films, Alfred Hitchcock’s in particular, and thus when the mansion goes up for sale following the deaths of its owners, he uses all his inheritance to purchase it.  It’s filled with every type of memorabilia relating to the famed director–original movie posters, scripts of his films, a screening room that plays the director’s films twenty-four hours a day, the typewriter Psycho was written on, and the black phone used by Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder.

Now the group from college–Zoe, T. J., Julius, Samira, and Grace–arrives, bringing their issues and problems with them.  Zoe was a renowned chef until her drinking got out of control; T. J. works as security for a Washington politician, but now he is being threatened and stalked; Julius is the heir to a family fortune who has never felt his own worth; Samira is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and the possible dissolution of her marriage; and Grace is carrying on an affair that’s purely sexual on her part but much more meaningful to the man involved.  Why has Alfred brought them together after all these years?

The six had met in the cinema course led by Professor Jerome Scott.  They all enjoyed the class but none with the fervor of Albert.  Yet it is this course, and this professor, that proved to be Albert’s downfall and years later the reason for the reunion at the Hitchcock Hotel.

Smettle has given his entire staff the weekend off except for his housekeeper Danny, who will cook for the group during their stay.  Now it’s the six of them plus Danny in the house, and all the tensions from their college years reemerge.

Stephanie Wrobel has cleverly intertwined the familiar trope of a group of people secluded from the rest of the world with one man’s obsession with recreating the make-believe world of his cinematic hero.  Her characters and their problems are real, as is the protagonist’s delusion that bringing the group together will right the wrong done to him years earlier.  You can read more about Stephanie Wrobel at this website.