Whisper House Press

Title: The Haunting of Room 904 (9781250908599)

Genre: Paranormal Mystery 👻

Author: Erika T. Wurth

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

Steve’s Rating: 4 ⭐ out of 5 ⭐

Content Notes: suicide, generational trauma related to massacre of indigenous people

Let’s say you’ve set out for a character-driven mystery with a strong female character facing a spooky cult at its center. Now add in a desire for a heavy dose of hauntings and paranormal doings. But that’s not all you want. You need the core indigenous character whose identity transcends national borders and who is secure in her own self-understanding to face a villain who herself uses the porous boundaries of American notions of race and culture as a weapon. Also at-risk family members. Also a respectable dash of family and generational trauma. And friends and acquaintances who might be part of the villainy. Guess what, friends? I bring Good News.

Paranormal investigator Olivia Becente is our hero, but she’s not perfect. She’s strong but not invincible. She’s wicked smart but carries enough self-doubt not to blunder overmuch headlong into “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” territory. As The Haunting of Room 904 opens, Olivia has recently lost her sister, and she’s not sure to what extent she herself is to blame for her sister’s end. Her ex, Josh, is a total creep—more than just your run-of-the-mill creep, too. He’s stalky enough that Olivia carries a firearm for her own protection. Yeah, he’s that worrying. Her nemesis is Jenny, a journalist who seems fixated on destroying Olivia’s livelihood through sensationalist and racist articles in Denver-area newspapers.

Haunts and ghosties are Olivia’s specialité nouveau. Since her sister Naiche’s demise, she’s made a living connecting with people’s lost relatives and unwanted apartment intruders, a kind of native ghostbuster—though that’s putting it a bit too pithily. Olivia is first and foremost a kind, concerned main character whose basic traits also include her enhanced paranormal perspicacity (apparently, she used to doubt this stuff actually worked). And the backdrop of the whole mystery into which Olivia is thrown is a cult and its leader, both obsessed with the new mystery in question. That mystery is the titular haunting of room 904 at the storied Brown Hotel in Denver, Colorado.

That’s the setup. The execution is largely exceptional and is entirely worth your time, if the premise appeals. Heck, even if you’re only so-so on the premise, chances are you’ll love the characters Erika T. Wurth has created in The Haunting of Room 904. As noted above, the strengths of this story are in its characters, who are all their own kinds of intriguing. Wurth also deftly handles the winding then unwinding of plot elements important to any compelling mystery. And the addition of ads for supposedly haunted artifacts selling on eBay were a humorous ingredient I’m glad Wurth included. The twists and turns of the story worked, and there’s a great deal to admire in the author’s tale-weaving.

There are a few minor weak spots, to this reader.

First, the author’s handling of the role of an attorney who seems at the same time to represent Olivia’s ghost-busting company along with Olivia herself and her business partner-slash-best-buddy—individually, together, and respectively. While the stakes deriving from the personal and emotional work extremely well throughout the story and drive the whole shebang, this detail, along with the specifically legal threats, are tough to swallow.

Another, more significant, tough-to-incorporate story element was the backdrop of an unnamed European massacre of native people in Denver—ne Ute, Cheyanne, and Arapahoe territory. In The Haunting of Room 904, the story unfolds mostly in first person, from Olivia’s perspective. However, interspersed here and there are chapters depicting the massacre, in third person, and this reader missed the core connection of the present-day story to that massacre along with the utility of this narrative structure. Some of the atrocity’s victims are present-day spirits trying to tell the main character something I’ll leave quiet here, and the aforementioned haunting of a hotel room seems tangentially to be related to that awful event—but the tangent isn’t a taut throughline and the connection of the main character to those characters isn’t clear. They seem to just so happen to be wanting to warn Olivia about the haunting’s particulars. Let’s leave open the distinct, nay, likely possibility that I’ve just missed the thread here… but it’s something I’d be remiss not to note.

These two mild criticisms aside, the point of this review is to help you find what you might like to read, and a lot of you are going to love this one.

This book leaves me wanting more from Wurth. To wit: There’s more Good News. White Horse, nominated for a GoodReads Choice Award in 2022, along with garnering a host of other recognitions, exists. That one was already on my TBR, but it’s now been moved far up the list. If you like the good humor of Grady Hendrix and the indigenously inspired storytelling elements of Nick Medina, I’d wager you’ll like The Haunting of Room 904.