Reviews: 'The Operator, by Gretchen Berg and 'The Sun Down Motel' by Simone St. James

By Gretchen Berg. (William Morrow, 342 pages, $26.99.)

"The Operator" is set in the early 1950s, when humans physically pulled and pushed cords into a switchboard in order to let people make phone calls. Yet the dominoes of family upheaval that arise from one operator's eavesdropping aren't much different from the travails that present-day social media can inspire.

Gretchen Berg also weaves in an unexpected thread of race relations, in addition to exploring sibling rivalry and class conflict, to create a compelling debut novel.

Loosely inspired by her own grandmother's stint as a Bell switchboard operator, Berg gives us Vivian Dalton, whose life is, well, fine. She nurses grudges, almost as a diversion, which becomes a theme that intensifies as a web of grudge-nursing characters get drawn into a years-old secret. When Vivian screams into her pillow, as happens with increasing frequency, it seems a completely justified — and safe — reaction to the turmoil around her. She's no saint, mind you, causing her own trouble at times. Her reaction to the secret at first seems overwrought. But Berg reminds us that mores were different in the 1950s. Still, some jealousies and insecurities never change.

KIM ODE

When are we too old for ghost stories? As long as they are as taut and twisty as Simone St. James' latest novel, make that never. In this modern-day crime mystery, the ghosts are very much a part of the cast of characters, specific spirits, pitiable, eternally wronged — and angry.

But let's talk about the living first. This is a multigenerational story about Carly, a 20-year-old woman who leaves college to visit an upstate New York town where a family mystery took place years before, and Vivian, Carly's aunt, who at age 20 was seemingly snatched from her job as a night clerk at the town's seediest inn. The timeline hops back and forth between the two young women in different decades, but soon we see that time doesn't matter in the supernatural world of the Sun Down Motel.

In 1982, Vivian learns of a string of murdered girls in the town's recent history. She sets off to right some wrongs, Nancy Drew style, grooming some accomplices along the way. Her investigation leads to a frequent motel guest as a possible serial killer — and to Viv's own mysterious disappearance in the middle of a November night, never to be heard from again.

In 2017, Carly visits the Sun Down, now dilapidated but still open, and ("Don't Do It!") takes a job as the night clerk, just as Viv did. She is soon hearing the same stories of the dead girls and is drawn down the same path. And then the motel's ghosts start appearing. She re-creates Vivian's perilous mistakes (genetic destiny?) and stumbles onto the same serial-killer theory that Viv did years before.

Will she find justice for the haunting victims in this new day? Or end up as Vivian did, a missing girl herself? Readers of this thoroughly entertaining thriller won't be disappointed.

GINNY GREENE