Vacations From Hell In A No-Tell Motel by Laura Hunsaker

 At this precise moment, I am sitting on a bed in a terrible motel not allowing my feet to touch the ground without shoes on. This is actually the norm for my family in a motel, but if my bare feet touch the carpet accidentally, I don't panic. This place, there is panic.

We are in beautiful San Diego, California for sports tournaments for one of the kids, and we stayed at the motel his buddy's dad recommended. The pictures online are 100% not the room we stayed in. The best we can figure is that all of the photos are from either a staged room, or from one room being renovated, or maybe just really old.

It was a dump. Look, it's a motel, I know you get what you pay for. However, we paid a whole lot of money for that room! So we all felt scammed. I feel I need to stress that it's not just me being snobby. The doors didn't fit the door jams. In one of the players' rooms, it looked as if the door had been kicked down and replaced but not actually fixed or fit. I texted my daughter who couldn't come with us for the trip, and told her how creepy this place was. She sent me a funny meme about ghostbusters and the Winchester Brothers. You guys...I cannot stress enough how I wish the room being haunted was the problem. It was more meth creepy, and less ghosts creepy.

This place was sketchy.

This all leads to what made me write about it. In some of my books, I've had the characters hiding out in a "no-tell motel" and while it's hella sketchy, with lumpy beds, and cracked walls, I don't think I really thought about how bad those places really are. 

Now to be fair, this is not actually the vacation from hell, the beach is gorgeous, I'll add some pics! However I'm sunburned, covered in beach sand, and I am going to go watch more sports on a field where we were swarmed by bees yesterday (not joking). So wish me luck, wish my kid's team luck, and cheer me up with your bad vacation stories.

And one very cool thing that happened, is one of the parents of a teammate is from Chester, CA the small town where I set my Fatal Instincts series!! (a couple hours outside of Reno, NV in the Sierra Mountain Range).  So, if you want to read about Lark and Jay in some better than this and nowhere near as creepy motels, check out Dangerous Past, coming out this summer!

www.laurahunsaker.com 

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"A thrilling romantic suspense!” —USA Today bestselling author, Katie Reus

She’s running from her past…


Lark Seawell is the daughter of a serial killer. His reputation has long been a shadow looming over her since his arrest when she was a child. Especially since she’s the one who called the police. She has spent her entire life trying to live as anonymously and quietly as possible. She is not her father’s legacy.


He wants to be her future...


FBI agent Jay Sutherland is visiting a friend in a small mountain town when free spirit Lark asks for help with her injured dog. He is instantly enamored with her, and their one night stand stays with him far into the next morning, though Lark is long gone. When his partner realizes that she is the daughter of The Highwayman, Jay refuses to believe Lark is anything like her father.


What happens when she stops running…


When a trail of dead bodies follows Lark on her cross-country drive, the FBI believes she’s the killer. How can the sweet woman who rescues injured animals and makes him feel things he hasn’t felt in years be a murderer? The bodies don’t lie. Jay knows there’s more at play. If he’s wrong, and Lark is as much a monster as her father, he may be the next target…