Welcome, dear guests, to the Grand Candidius Hotel: a five-star establishment complete with all the best accoutrements and modern facilities, a marriage of high style and elegance, a jewel overlooking the lake – truly a paradise on earth.
Or it was, until the morning its owner, Pai Wei-To, was found dead on a jogging path, with water in his lungs and a bullet in his back. An ensuing investigation carried out in this beautiful place of leisure begins to peel back one layer of intrigue after another. A famous avian biologist, a retired policeman, a lawyer with old ties to the victim’s family, and an infamous criminal all surface in the case, but while everyone’s guilty of something, no one was meant to die.
Veteran crime novelist Lee Po-Ching leads us down into the darkness, spinning riddles with riddles, unveiling a dark world beneath a beautiful surface. The hotel’s inner world, like the book’s narrative, is mercilessly captivating: as the Eagles famously sang, “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”