Hokey Pokey

A grand hotel, a famous opera star and a psychoanalyst with a hidden agenda. Kate Mascarenhas's third novel offers her readers a glamorous, thrilling ride through murder, madness and the darkest recesses of the mind. February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed facade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, while the hotel's red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand. In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn't see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she's determined not to let her out of her sight. But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel - and its guests - from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur... Praise for Kate Mascarenhas: 'Breathtakingly tender and wryly understated' New York Times 'Witty, inventive and unflashily wise about the human heart' Guardian