Simone St. James books are not all created equal, and I say that as someone who has read the last four she’s published. St. James spent twenty years working in television budgeting outside Toronto before writing full time, and was rejected for six years and three unpublished novels before her 2012 debut, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, won two RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel from Crime Writers of Canada. Her books blend a genuine ghost story with a crime investigation, almost always across two timelines decades apart. Of the four St. James books I have read, The Sun Down Motel is still my favorite, and each book since has been a slightly smaller version of that same feeling, without any of them dropping below a good rating. I have not yet read her first five books, including Maddy Clare and The Broken Girls, one of her best-known titles. Here is my honest ranking of the four I have read.
The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
The Sun Down Motel (Berkley, February 2020) follows two women a generation apart: Viv Delaney, who works the night desk at a roadside motel in Fell, New York in 1982 and vanishes without a trace, and her niece Carly, who takes the same night-desk job in 2017 to find out what happened to her. Carly starts noticing things at the motel that the official investigation never accounted for. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery & Thriller and the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Novel. I gave The Sun Down Motel five stars, and my Goodreads record shows a read count of two (the site logs two read-throughs, though only one finish date, January 2020, is on file). This is the book that set the format St. James has used ever since: a haunted, specific place carries the dread, and the present-day narrator investigates it as much as she is haunted by it. Every other book on this list gets measured against this one, including by me.
This one is for you if you want a ghost story and a missing-persons case treated as equally real. Find The Sun Down Motel on Goodreads.
Murder Road by Simone St. James
Murder Road (Berkley, March 2024) follows newlyweds April and Eddie, who take a wrong turn on their honeymoon and end up on Atticus Line, a stretch of road outside Coldlake Falls with a documented history of unsolved murders. They pick up a hitchhiker who is bleeding from a stab wound before they reach a hospital, and by the time she dies, the local police have decided April and Eddie are their best suspects. The novel was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror, her second nomination in that category after Silence for the Dead in 2014. I gave Murder Road four stars. It is the most overtly supernatural book St. James has written in this run (the earlier books let a haunting sit at the edge of the plot, this one puts it in the middle of the road, literally) and the risk pays off. The pacing is faster than The Sun Down Motel, and the small-town history St. James builds around Atticus Line is some of her most confident world-building yet.
This one is for you if you want St. James at her most explicitly supernatural. Find Murder Road on Goodreads.
The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James
The Book of Cold Cases (Berkley, March 2022) follows Shea Collins, a medical receptionist who runs a true-crime blog by night, after a chance encounter with Beth Greer. Beth was the prime suspect in the 1977 Lady Killer Murders in Claire Lake, Oregon, and was acquitted at trial. Shea asks Beth for an interview and Beth agrees, and the more time Shea spends inside Beth’s mansion, the more she notices details (a moved object, a face at a window) that the interview alone cannot explain. I gave The Book of Cold Cases four stars. The haunting here is quieter and slower than in Murder Road, closer to an ambient presence than a plot device, and Shea’s role as an amateur blogger rather than a professional investigator keeps the tone personal rather than procedural. It is a more patient book than Murder Road, and it asks more patience of the reader in return.
This one is for you if you want the version of St. James where the crime, not the ghost, drives most of the tension. Find The Book of Cold Cases on Goodreads.
A Box Full of Darkness by Simone St. James
A Box Full of Darkness (Berkley, January 2026) follows siblings Violet, Vail, and Dodie Esmie, who return to the house they fled eighteen years earlier after their six-year-old brother Ben disappeared while in their care. The ghost claiming to be Ben has one request: come home. The novel is set in Fell, New York, the same fictional town as The Sun Down Motel, though the two books are not a direct sequel. I gave A Box Full of Darkness three stars. It is a full novel, not a shorter or lesser format, and the family-guilt plot is genuinely sad in a way St. James handles well. But it is the smallest version of what made The Sun Down Motel work for me: the same haunted-place, buried-family-secret structure, executed competently rather than at full strength. It is the most recent book of the four, and the one I would recommend last, not because it fails but because everything before it does the same thing better.
This one is for you if you have already read The Sun Down Motel and want more time in Fell, New York. Find A Box Full of Darkness on Goodreads.
If you are new to Simone St. James, start with The Sun Down Motel. It is both her best book of the four I have read and her most accessible one, and every other book on this list gets measured against it, including by me. I have not yet read her first five novels, among them The Haunting of Maddy Clare (her RITA and Arthur Ellis Award-winning debut) and The Broken Girls, one of her best-known titles. That is a real gap in my reading, not a quiet omission. If you like St. James’s haunted, atmospheric thrillers, Riley Sager is worth a look for a similar sense of dread built into one place. For more, my list of best thrillers for beginners covers where to start with the genre. Find me on Instagram and Goodreads — I’d love to know which one you read first.