February 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six­storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, while the hotel's red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.

In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent, and ambitious. Though she doesn't see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she's determined not to let her out of her sight.

But when a terrible snowstorm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur...

Kate Mascarenhas is a writer born in 1980 of mixed heritage (white Irish father, brown British mother) and has family in Ireland and the Republic of Seychelles. She lives in Birmingham with her partner. After studying English at Oxford and Applied Psychology at Derby, Kate completed a Literary Studies and Psychology PhD at Worcester. She has written three novels: The Psychology of Time Travel, The Thief on the Winged Horse, and Hokey Pokey.