Right from the novel’s intriguing title –Hotels of Silence –, Javier Vásconez drags us to the brink of horror. For is there anything more chilling than the sound of a child’s cry piercing the night from inside a hotel? However, the greatest achievement of Hotels of Silence is perhaps its ability to trace various stories of desperate humanity in one novel. It is set in is a city shaken by a terrifying succession of kidnappings, murders and other chilling crimes in which the victims are children, its most defenseless and vulnerable inhabitants. In Vásconez’s work, the city dwellers go out in search of love and of themselves: characters whose consciences are weighed down by unresolved stories of an overwhelming past, intent on rebuilding their shipwrecked lives.