Hotel Paradiso

by Gregor Robinson

Gregor Robinson's debut novel charts a season in the life of 30-something David Rennison, a disillusioned banker fleeing a failed relationship and the rat race of Montreal for the warmer climes of the Bahamian port of Pigeon Cay. A fair-weather expatriate, he has come to the subtropics in search of exotic escape, but stumbles upon genteel corruption, white-collar crime, racism, and murder. Amid the turmoil of illegal Haitian refugees, voodoo rituals, and the powdery trail of drug smugglers, Rennison peers into the lives of those that both create and inherit his purgatory. His botanist handbook gradually assumes the voice of a confessional diary, betraying details of a burgeoning affair capable of remedy or poison.

208 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not really a novel, it's more like a collection of short stories that share the same protagonist and some of the characters with connecting interludes between them. As such, several of the chapters have different moods - one is humourous, a couple of others are a little mysterious, some just tell a story about characters on the island. It's set on a Bahamian island, Pigeon Cay, where David Rennison, a Montrealer, travels to open up a local bank branch. Some of the book felt very familiar to me - I think I've read similar types of descriptions. On the other hand, most of it I found fairly interesting, and the whole community was interesting enough to keep me reading. I enjoyed it. It's Robinson's first novel, and it would be interesting to read some of his later novels and see how his style develops and changes.

['Nathan Burgoine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this one. It was originally released in a serial format, and the characters are often more important than the plot. When a banker leaves the Montreal rat-race to run a bank in the Bahamian out-port Pigion Cay, things get interesting, fast. Drugs, murder, racism, and a healthy dose of intrigue confound his life quite quickly - it seems the man's plans to write a botanical guide are going to have to be put to the wayside, unless it's himself he wants to finish...