An adjunct English professor and struggling writer, Iris Greenfeder finally has a shot at success, when an essay she wrote, reminiscing about her mother, is published in a small literary journal. The essay brings Iris to the attention of a high profile New York City literary agent who encourages Iris to write a memoir of her mother -- a fantasy writer who wrote a popular trilogy under the pseudonym K.R. LaFleur.
Determined to face the shadows of her past, Iris returns to the Hotel Equinox in the Hudson Valley where she grew up and begins to untangle her mother's mysterious past. Fifty years earlier, her mother had arrived at the hotel, penniless, with almost no belongings and seemingly no past to work as a maid. She eventually married the hotel manager, Ben Greenfeder, and wrote the first two novels of the fantasy trilogy. But after Iris was born, her mother apparently stopped writing. Then when Iris was 9-years-old her mother left and never returned. The family later discovered that she had died in a hotel fire in Brooklyn where she was registered as another man's wife.
Trying to find clues to her mother's strange actions, Iris rereads her mother's books and talks to people at the hotel who knew her. She slowly reconstructs her mother's past and tries to solve the mystery of her disappearance and death. What she finds though is that her mother's past before she appeared at the hotel in 1949 seems to be a total blank. Iris has reason to believe that her mother in fact had written the third book in the trilogy, but is unable to find the manuscript. But she does learn that the day her mother showed up at the hotel for the first time, a woman was killed at a local train station -- awoman with the same last name her mother was registered under at the hotel the day she died.
Desperately trying to find the connection between the two woman, Iris is forced to stop her research when the third manuscript of Iris's mother's trilogy is found by a man who is subsequently murdered. Iris comes to believe that her mother's fantasy fiction might hold the clues to understanding her mother's past. And it is only when she's able to decode the peculiar blend of fairy tale and fantasy of her mother's books that Iris is able to solve the mysteries of the past and present.