Showing results by author "Scarlett Hayes" in All Categories

Insurance investigator Nora Vásquez-Hollins arrives in the quiet mountain town of Prospect, Colorado to verify what should be a routine estate claim. Instead, she finds a problem. A valuable Art Nouveau brooch listed among a dead man’s belongings should not exist. Years earlier, the same brooch was reported stolen. And the insurance payout was already made. As Nora examines the late Raymond Esterholt’s meticulously organized records, she discovers an archive of carefully documented transactions stretching back decades.

Twenty-five years ago, the beloved innkeeper of a small Colorado mountain town vanished without a trace. When recently divorced hotel manager Ben Hartley buys the long-abandoned Prospect House, he expects renovation challenges—not a buried mystery tied to the inn’s tragic past. As Ben restores the historic Victorian, he uncovers hidden evidence left behind by Margaret Crawford, the woman who disappeared the night she planned to expose a century-old web of corruption. Letters. Financial records. A final recorded confession.

At The Prospect House, every guest eventually checks out. Except one. While digitizing decades of guest ledgers at a historic Colorado inn, Ben Hartley discovers a name that never received a checkout date—Eleanor Price, listed as staying weeks after official records declare her dead. What begins as a clerical anomaly becomes a quiet reckoning with the past, as Ben uncovers a pattern of deliberate omissions stretching back generations.

A quiet mountain town. A historic inn. A death no one wants investigated. Freelance journalist Avery Mitchell comes to Prospect, Colorado to write a feel-good feature about a former mining town reinventing itself. Nestled among towering peaks and old Victorian buildings, Prospect seems like the perfect place to catch her breath—and remember why she became a writer in the first place. Then one of the inn’s guests disappears. When his body is discovered near an abandoned mine high on Eagle Ridge, authorities quickly rule the death an accident.