A review by eve_prime
The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye

4.5

Very enjoyable, though there are certainly moments of shocking violence.  It's the early 1920s, and Alicia James is on the run from the New York City mafia.  She's been working with them closely - one of their leaders has been her guardian - but she's got a bullet wound and knows she has to get away as far and as fast as she can.  On the train to Portland, Oregon, she buys a record from a Pullman porter named Max, and when they get to Portland he helps her by taking her to the all-Black hotel where he lives, the Paragon Hotel.  A doctor there fixes her up, and as she recuperates she gets to know some of the people who live there, especially Blossom Fontaine, a very sharp nightclub singer.  One day several of them take young Davy Lee, a mulatto boy, to an amusement park - but he disappears.  Has the Klan taken him?  We learn about the Klan's big presence in Oregon in the 1920s, and we also learn about the New York City mafia, as we get Alicia's backstory.  It's interesting and entertaining, with some big surprises.  I remembered one of them before I started rereading it, and was pretty sure of another once I'd started, but there were yet others that I hadn't remembered.