Hotels have always been popular as settings for crime fiction. In the last few years, though, there’s been an element added. Maybe it was there before, and I wasn’t aware of it. In Audrey Keown’s Hotel 1911 mysteries, the amateur sleuth, a hotel clerk, has panic attacks. Nita Prose’s maid in The Maid has social awareness issues. Now, in S.K. Golden’s The Socialite’s Guide to Murder, Evelyn Elizabeth Grace Murphy suffers from agoraphobia and anxiety. Although that’s not the point of this novel, it struck me because I read all three of those mysteries.

In 1958, the Pinnacle Hotel is one of the premiere hotels in New York City. Twenty-one-year-old Evelyn Murphy is the pampered daughter of the hotel’s owner. She’s lived there most of her life, even before her mother was murdered when she was six. Her therapist told her she suffers from shell shock and agoraphobia because she’s the one who discovered the body. She fired the therapist, but she hasn’t left the hotel in fourteen months.

Evelyn models herself on Marilyn Monroe, and she’s dressed as the actress the night of a party for artist Billie Bell. But, the party doesn’t turn out quite as planned. Evelyn’s best friend, actor Henry Fox, has a fight with the artist before the grand reveal for his latest painting. The painting is gone, though, and Henry is the primary suspect in the theft. Evelyn wants to prove Henry didn’t steal the painting, but, before she can, the artist is murdered. It’s a hotel employee who is arrested for the murder, but Evelyn won’t accept that. She enlists bellboy Mac Cooper to help in her investigation.

I’ll admit Evelyn is an acquired taste, and I didn’t quite acquire it. She is pampered and spoiled, and several men call her on that. The hotel manager tells her she’s nosy and spoiled, “a brat styled like Marilyn Monroe”. When she insists Mac didn’t steal a necklace, Detective Hodgson, the investigating police officer, tells her, “Then you are as stupid as they say you are.” However, I did start to feel sorry for her; the poor little rich girl who found her dead mother, and whose father travels the world, and is seldom at the hotel. There are reasons she’s devoted to her dog and a few friends at the hotel.

As to the mystery itself, I guessed the killer early on in the book. I did read to the end, though, because I was curious as to how this spoiled young woman would solve the case while never leaving the hotel. The Socialite’s Guide to Murder was entertaining, but I probably won’t read the next Pinnacle Hotel mystery.

S. K. Golden’s website is https://www.skgolden.net/

The Socialite’s Guide to Murder by S. K. Golden. Crooked Lane Books, 2022. ISBN 9781639101764 (hardcover), 320p.

FTC Full Disclosure – The publisher sent a copy of the book, with no promise of a positive review.