This was a fairly average YA mystery, with a bit of a Gothic twist (mysterious old hotel with a locked room), a few tired tropes (will with a secret letter to be opened some months after the bequest to reveal the actual disposition of assets -- is that even legal?), a hokey scare-people-away scheme in the best Nancy Drew tradition, and some truly cringe-worthy "Indian" religion thrown in. Not Hinduism, but indigenous religion. One character is Indigenous and uses a travesty of First Nations religion to threaten people (for instance, writing a note reading "...go back to where you came from... You make the manito (sic) angry.") Another character is the hotel cook, of French and Indigenous origin, who is constantly going on strike and disrupting the operation of the hotel, not from malevolent motives but because she believes that the hotel has "been taken over by an evil manito" and is threatened by spirit birds. Her beliefs as presented are childish, irrational and superstitious in the highest degree. The book as a whole left me wanting to avoid this author in future. In fairness to Whitney, she wrote this in 1949 (but even in 1949 a person should research what they write about and even consider using some cultural sensitivity). I was misled by the paperback cover showing two young people of the mid-1970s. I have no idea why the publisher thought it would be a good idea to reprint this. ( )