Hokey Pokey

A grand hotel, a famous opera star and a psychoanalyst with a hidden agenda. KateMascarenhas's third novel offers her readers a glamorous, thrilling ride throughmurder, 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 façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, whilethe hotel's red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the. nestservice 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 istravelling 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 outsideworld, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur.