Spanish Main author keeps her readers guessing in 11th book

Before it was The Chart House, it was the grounds of Longboat Key’s “Ghost Hotel.”

That’s what the structure left by John Ringling’s attempt to build a Ritz-Carlton on the site became known as after it was abandoned, unfinished, during the Great Depression. Now it’s the setting for Meredith Ellsworth’s 11th book.

“The Pit and The Passion: Murder at the Ghost Hotel,” debuted  Jan. 22 online through Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, KOBO and Google.

Perhaps better known by her pen name, M.S. Spencer, Ellsworth tends to write adventure and murder mystery novels.

“The Pit and the Passion” follows a reporter for the Longboat Key Planet, Charity Snow, and best-selling author Rancor Bass as they try to uncover the truth about a skeleton and college ring found in a deserted hotel.

Ellsworth, a Spanish Main Yacht Club resident, compares Snow and Bass to Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

“I can’t even think of any modern couples that have that clever of a vibe. But anyway, they team up to discover the identity of the corpse, and it leads them into the history of the Ringling family,” Ellsworth said. “Not the circus so much, but they go to the Ca’ d’Zan. …”

Ellsworth’s inspiration usually springs from settings, such as it did when she learned about the Ghost Hotel. She often finds specific locations through Google searches.

As for her characters, they tend to develop on their own, she said.

“I don’t even have names for them until about the third chapter because they start to emerge on their own,” she said. “You give them just ‘slash name’ or give them a name and go back when you know them better because they do become their own.”

It takes Ellsworth about seven or eight drafts before her books are ready to be published because consistency, especially in murder mysteries, is important.

“The first is like a glorified outline,” she said. “It may be [30,000] or 40,000 words then you go back over it and the characters start to build, then just checking dates and what time of day it is when they are doing this, and what they are wearing at the beginning of the scene, what are they not wearing at the end of scene and often even after it has gone through a couple editors, we’ll find something.”

Along with consistency, Ellsworth says rationality is just as important.

“It has to make sense,” she said. “The motive has to make sense. The actions have to accord with the personalities, the way [characters] react to things. The clues have to be there for the reader. It’s not fair to just spring stuff on them, and even with the surprise twist here, the clues were all there. I just had not seen them, which I figure is going to be great for the reader if I couldn’t figure it out.”

And speaking of surprise twists, Ellsworth doesn’t always know what the ending of her books will be when she starts a project. Her first book, “Lost In His Arms,” was published in 2009. For that book, the ending came to her in a dream before she started writing. But that wasn’t the case, for “The Pit and the Passion.”

“In this one, the surprise ending I actually put in the last draft before it went to galley, so I like it,” she said. “It just fell into place. There are lots of surprises along the way.”