Welcome to The Last Chance Hotel
Hard-working Seth is the kitchen boy in the remote Last Chance Hotel, owned by the nasty Bunn family and their toxic daughter, Tiffany, his only friend is Nightshade, the kitchen cat.
He dreams of leaving, and of a future beyond the Last Hope Forest, away from Tiffany’s schemes to torment him and wonders if his chance for change might finally have arrived when a bunch of strange characters come to stay.
But things go terribly wrong when the dessert Seth carefully made to impress kindly Dr Thallomius, instead poisons him.
Seth finds himself at the heart of a murder investigation with a lot more than Tiffany to worry about as he is the main suspect and accused of the crime. But Seth’s problems don’t end there. The eccentric guests are all sorcerers and Seth suspects magic was at the bottom of the crime.
How can he possibly find the real culprit and clear his name when he doesn’t have the first clue about magic, or why someone might have wanted to kill the most important sorcerer in the land.
Nicki Thornton’s debut won the Ealing Junior Book Award, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and the Prix Elbakin.Net for fantasy writing in France. She was shortlisted for the CrimeFest Best Crime Novel for Children, the Oxfordshire Book Award Best Junior Novel, the Warwickshire Junior Book Award and the Specsavers National Book Awards.