Join us for the launch of Welsh author Louise Mumford’s gripping new thriller, The Hotel.

The Hotel: 
Four students travel to Ravencliffe, an eerie abandoned hotel perched on steep cliffs on the Welsh coast. After a series of unexplained accidents, only three of them leave. The fourth, Leo, disappears, and is never seen again. Only three of them came back.

A decade on, the friends have lost contact. Oscar is fame-hungry, making public appearances and selling his story. Richard sank into alcoholism and is only just recovering. Bex just wants to forget – until one last opportunity to go back offers the chance to find out what really happened to Leo. Ten years later, they return one last time. But as soon as they get to the hotel things start going wrong again. Objects mysteriously disappear and reappear. Accidents happen. And Bex realises that her former friends know far more than they are letting on about the true events at Ravencliffe that night...

Louise Mumford was born and lives in South Wales. In her fifteen-year teaching career she tried to pass on her love of reading to her students (and discovered that the secret to successful teaching is… stickers! She is aware that that is, essentially, bribery.) In the summer of 2019 Louise experienced a once-in-a-lifetime moment: she was discovered as a new writer by her publisher at the Primadonna Festival. Everything has been a bit of a whirlwind since then. Louise lives in Cardiff with her husband and spends her time trying to get down on paper all the marvellous and thrilling things that happen in her head. Her debut book, Sleepless, a “frighteningly inventive” speculative thriller inspired by her own experience of insomnia, was published by HQ in December 2020. It has reached the overall Top 50 UK Kindle Chart and was the Karin Slaughter July 2021 Killer Read in UK Asda stores nationwide. Her second thriller, The Safe House, also a Kindle bestseller, was released in May 2022 and her third novel The Hotel is released in paperback in August. Louise is Co-Chair of Crime Cymru, a co-operative of crime fiction writers with a connection to Wales and is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association. She was part of the team behind Gŵyl CRIME CYMRU Festival – the first international in-person crime fiction Feftival held in Aberystwyth.  Louise was one of just ten writers picked to be part of Hay Festival’s prestigious Writers At Work scheme 2023, a creative development programme for emerging Welsh talent.