This was a book that kept me interested from beginning to end. This book was so different from anything I’ve read recently definitely a one of a kind. I finished this book during a storm and it was the perfect way to come to an end to this very unusual and wonderful book. I found that all very interesting and the author wove it into the story in such a way that it fit wonderfully with this strange tale. I like the way the author incorporated Frankenstein and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron in the book as well. I certainly would not have wanted to see him standing outside my room door! The wax figurines gave a creepy feel to the book and most especially, Grock the Clown. The setting was enchanting an old haunted castle in Switzerland and I thought the colors on the cover and the maniacal face of Grock the Clown in the title were perfect. I could see it in my head as I read, playing out like an old movie. The book reads like a detective novel -slash- ghost story and reminded me of a Hitchcock film. The scenes from when she was a Nellie Olsen-ish teenager with a bad attitude were quite funny. I found Helena to be one of my favorite characters with her many piercings and chunky boots. Another student from the school is also on the team of investigators, Helena, who is a clairvoyant. Rachel now works as a public relations person for a ghost hunting team who has come to the Inn to try and contact Rachel’s and Lauren’s former teacher, Mlle Schwartz and Rachel gets her friend Lauren, who is a writer, a job with the ghost hunting team she works for. Detective Cloquet wants his deputy to shadow Lauren Briant and Rachel Gordon, both former students of the school who are coming to the Inn, Lauren for a vacation and Rachel, to work. This begins an investigation and a detective with Interpol, Detective Cloquet gets his deputy and nephew, Paul Junod (who in the beginning poses as a taxi driver/ college student) to become part of the ghost hunting film crew that is coming to stay at the Inn. Former students of the school receive notice that their school is now an Inn and they show up – and then they disappear. Mlle Schwartz, a teacher at the school is murdered and the school goes out of business and sits empty for eight years until it is turned into some kind of strange Wax Museum/ Inn years later. Julia's literary works include The Red Sea Bride (aka Sylvia Fowler)and Burning Boats: The Birth of Muslim Spain.Ĭhateau Mont Rose has a nasty past. She has won a few literary awards, including first place for children's fiction in the Seven Hills Writers’ Contest of the Tallahassee Writers’ Association. Her stories “The Outing” and “Up in Smoke” were broadcast over the BBC World Service and can be found in Under a Crescent Moon: Stories of Arabia, on Amazon and Nook. She wrote for the Saudi Gazette, Arab News, and Riyadh Daily newspapers as well as the English Service of the Saudi Broadcasting System. There the sea was as warm as the water in a bathtub and the fish could fly. Born and raised in California, Julia Simpson-Urrutia studied French in Switzerland and later, at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies in California, where she met her future husband, a young Saudi.Īfter earning a Master’s degree at SDSU and studies in Arabic and Spanish, she accompanied her husband to Jeddah, a 5,000 year old city by the Red Sea.

Waxworks 2 frankenstein