The seduction of water

"Many years ago, Iris Greenfeder's mother disappeared. They were living at Hotel Equinox where Iris's father was the manager. Then she took a train and never returned, dying in a hotel fire in Brooklyn where she was registered as another man's wife."@en
"For Iris Greenfeder - all but published, all but a professor, and all but married to her boyfriend of ten years - the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother, Katherine, leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime - and nestled inside is the sad story of her mother's death, a strange, untimely end in a fire thirty years ago. When Iris returns to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother's biography and search for her mother's missing manuscript, she unravels a haunting mystery that threatens to envelop her."@en
"After writing a story about her late mother, Katherine Morrissey, that includes a dark Irish fairy tale told to her by her mother, Iris Greenfeder returns her childhood home at the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, intending to write her mother's biography and search for a long-lost manuscript written by Katherine, only to stumble into the middle of a haunting mystery."@en