"Carter's debut is a sparkling romance with vivid characters and sharp, crystalline prose ... A page-turning tale of the healing power of love." - Kirkus Reviews

"The Lyric Hotel is one of the best reads I've had in years. Funny, heartbreaking, raw, eloquent, and surprisingly heroic. Susan Sisko Carter has created a jewel box of great characters and sparkling dialogue in telling the story of a woman's unconventional journey in search of real but ever-elusive love." - Stephen Tobolowsky, actor, author of The Dangerous Animals Club

"Susan Sisko Carter writes like she sings: she's sultry, yet playful, mixing the improvisation of jazz with the urgency of rock n' roll." - Michele Kort, author of Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro

Six months after the loss of her husband, Jeanette moves to the last place she felt truly alive: the Lyric Hotel-where she spent a night with a musician. A night that changed the course of her life.

A successful director of commercials, Jeanette doesn't tell her rep. She doesn't tell her oldest friend. Not even her mother. She vanishes from the world she knew and takes up residence in a hotel that caters to musicians on the road. At the hotel, Jeanette can be the architect of her evolving self: a woman unfettered by preexisting conditions of who she was-or wasn't.

Jeanette's quest to lose herself is funny and heartbreaking as she encounters an assortment of complicated men. But there is one constant: longing; like the longing of a Brandi Carlyle song or the moan of an electric guitar through the wall of her junior suite.

Inspired by Susan Sisko Carter's real-life adventures, The Lyric Hotel is an escape from a harsh world to a world where a Privacy-Please sign keeps out the past so the present might flourish.