So after only a little bit of torturing, I got caught and sent to prison where I turned snitch and testified against a major Snicket dealer and now I'm in the Snicket Protection Programme. Happy ending after all!

The Hotel in The Penultimate Peril is called Hotel Denouement, for reasons that are fairly obvious, and of course it's a very Snickety denouement indeed: sure, lots of characters from the previous books are all gathered together in one big hotel for a final showdown, a trial where Olaf and the orphans get to plead the case, but everyone ends up running around the place in blindfolds while it starts to burn down around them, the sort of development which should come as no surprise to anyone who's being paying attention.

The hotel could also have been called the Hotel Ambiguous, because for much of it the orphans don't know who is a volunteer and who is a villain and which actions are part of a noble scheme and which part of a villainous one. In fact it's so expertly crafted to be a series of ambiguous events, that it is, in its way, a perfect denouement for the kids. They have spent a lot of the series relatively powerless and forced into passivity. The more actions they take, the more ambivalent they feel about their own morality and doing bad things for good reasons.

The reader might feel they're overthinking it a bit, since all of their actions were forced on them by bad people, but how many of the bad people started out the same way? And, sure. it wasn't their fault the bad people forced them into such situations where they had to do bad things to escape or survive, but life often forces us into situations a bit like that, if not perhaps as melodramatic. This may be a more valid view of how life works than readers care to admit. This series is basically Thomas Hardy for kids. The author may have been perfectly sincere when he goes on about how awfully this all turns out.