Asylum Hotel

Big, old buildings are always the best places to set a scary story, so when I heard about Juliet Blackwell‘s new mystery, Asylum Hotel, I was intrigued. Aubrey Spencer likes to photograph abandoned buildings, and that leads her to the little-known Seabrink Hotel, closed for over 50 years and mired in murmurings of past murders and a curse. She meets another trespasser at the hotel, Dimitri. They enjoy a night together… then she wakes up to find that he’s fallen from a cliff to his death. Is it the curse? Was he murdered? And is she in danger, too?

What I Liked:

The abandoned building vibes. So much of this book is centered on an old hotel that’s been taken over by nature. The descriptions are evocative and set the stage for an engrossing tale. It made me also want to go photograph creepy, abandoned buildings.
Ghosts! A curse! Like Nikki, I’m a big fan of horror movies, and I especially love anything with a ghostly bent. This book offered plenty of that, but as far as the characters know, it’s all just local legend. But Dimitri’s death does seem like he’s only the latest victim of that curse…
The history behind the hotel, the poor farm, and the Quiet Girl. My favorite aspect by far was learning about the complicated past of the Seabrink Hotel and the people who lived there. Learning about the Quiet Girl was rather heartbreaking, but I also enjoyed how she continued to play a role in the book.

What Didn’t Work for Me:

Slow beginning. On the one hand, I liked how the book jumped straight into detailed descriptions of the abandoned hotel, frozen in time and reclaimed by nature. But on the other hand, the whole first chapter was like that, and it was hard to get invested in the story from that starting point. Introducing other characters was rather awkwardly done in those first few chapters, too.
Detective Jenkins. He just jumps to conclusions immediately and doesn’t care about doing his job. He’s so incompetent! Fire him!
Humor throughout the book. Maybe what I wanted from Asylum Hotel just wasn’t aligned with what the author intended, but for me, the characters’ frequent jokes and light humor took me out of the story. Scary and supernatural things are happening; why are they cracking jokes? I wanted the story to be spooky, not funny.

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot I enjoyed about Asylum Hotel, from the hotel’s sordid history to the hauntings that persist to this day. But the book was also uneven in many ways, and I found myself wanting it to unfold a bit differently. This is my first time reading Juliet Blackwell, and though I had mixed feelings on this one, I am curious to read some of her other books.

Special thanks to the publicists at Penguin Random House, Berkley, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy Asylum Hotel here – it’s available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

Asylum Hotel by Juliet Blackwell
Audience	Adult
Genre	Mystery; Thriller
Setting	California
Number of Pages	384
Format I Read	Audiobook & Ebook (NetGalley ARC)
Original Publication Date	July 29, 2025
Publisher	Berkley

Official Summary

When a mysterious figure shows up in the photograph an architect takes of the derelict Seabrink Hotel, ghostly encounters and murder are unleashed.

Aubrey Spencer loves photographing classic old buildings and abandoned places that hold old secrets. The Hotel Seabrink, perched overlooking the sea, is one such place. Currently abandoned but scheduled for a major renovation, it has a torrid history. Back in the 1920s it hosted A-list celebrity clientele, and now the locals insist it is haunted by the ghosts of two young women who died there. When Aubrey goes to photograph the site before the renovation begins, she bumps into a man named Dimitri Petroff, a minor online celebrity who shares her fascination with old buildings, the Hotel Seabrink in particular.

When he is found dead the next day at the base of a cliff, the police are quick to close the investigation. But Aubrey feels unsettled by locals who claim he was murdered and that it’s not the first time someone interested in the hotel was killed. As she digs deeper into the property’s dark history (and its origins as an asylum) as well as Dimitri’s professional rivalries, she becomes mired in an unsolved murder case from several decades earlier, one with eerie parallels to the contemporary case. But someone is determined to keep her from discovering the truth—at any cost.

About the Author

Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master’s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel León-Portilla’s seminal work, Endangered Cultures. Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY–Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and served as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award–nominated Art Lover’s Mystery series She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America.