{"id":4571,"date":"2022-10-10T14:51:23","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T14:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?page_id=4571"},"modified":"2022-10-11T08:26:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T08:26:05","slug":"the-last-chance-hotel-by-nicki-thornton","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/the-last-chance-hotel-by-nicki-thornton\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Chance Hotel, by Nicki Thornton"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/last-chance-hotel.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4620\" src=\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/last-chance-hotel.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"191\" height=\"293\" \/><\/a>The Last Chance Hotel<\/em>, by Nicki Thornton<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This one is lovely \u2013 aimed at younger kids than Harry Potter and enjoyed by much older kids, like me. Seth is a put-upon kitchen boy at the eponymous hostelry, which is somewhere on the scale between a faded Grand Budapest and a nightmare Margate b&amp;b with pretentions, when it pays host to a meeting of magicians. Soon there\u2019s a murder and it turns into a locked room mystery, with magic. As you would expect in these things, Seth has a much richer background than he realises when it comes to magic and stuff, but the clues and rules of magic are fairly presented to the reader so that it\u2019s a proper detective story too. Winner of the 2016 Times\/Chicken House children&#8217;s fiction competition, where one of the judges was Chicken House\u2019s Barry Cunningham (\u201cthe man who discovered JK Rowling\u201d), and very deservingly so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Last Chance Hotel, by Nicki Thornton This one is lovely \u2013 aimed at younger kids than Harry Potter and enjoyed by much older kids, like me. Seth is a put-upon kitchen boy at the eponymous hostelry, which is somewhere &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/the-last-chance-hotel-by-nicki-thornton\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":368,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4571","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4571"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4657,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4571\/revisions\/4657"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}