Emma Graham Books in Order

The Emma Graham books follow a twelve year old girl who waits tables in her mother’s decaying lakeside hotel and cannot stop thinking about old crimes. Emma lives at the Hotel Paradise in the small towns of Spirit Lake and La Porte, places where gossip travels fast and secrets have had decades to harden.

In Hotel Paradise, Emma becomes fixated on the long ago drowning of Mary Evelyn Devereau, a girl her own age who died forty years earlier. The case was written off as an accident, but Emma starts visiting abandoned houses, questioning elderly witnesses, and piecing together what really happened, all while refilling coffee cups and sneaking time on the hotel porch.

Cold Flat Junction, Belle Ruin, and Fadeaway Girl carry that thread forward rather than starting fresh cases. As Emma digs deeper she runs into more recent murders, the mysterious shooting of Fern Queen, the story of a baby who may have been stolen from the grand Belle Rouen hotel, and finally an attack that leaves Emma herself recovering while she keeps asking questions. The result feels like one long, winding investigation broken into four books.

Part of the series’ appeal is Emma’s voice. She is bright, stubborn, and often very funny, more interested in the odd corners of town life than in school or polite conversation. Grimes lets her wander down side streets, investigate old grocery ledgers, and pursue side schemes like subtly doctoring the meals of an insufferable boarder, so that the mystery and the portrait of small town life are always intertwined.

Although the stories have real stakes, the pace is reflective rather than breathless. The decaying hotel, the shuttered houses on the lake, and the Rainbow Cafe downtown feel lived in and specific, built from details Grimes first noticed as a child in her mother’s own hotel. Readers who start here get a slow burn combination of coming of age story, cold case investigation, and slightly gothic summer vacation.

Because each book leans on what came before, the Emma Graham series works best in order, beginning with Hotel Paradise and moving straight through to Fadeaway Girl.