It’s ball season in Vienna, and Maria Wallner only wants one thing: to restore her family’s hotel, the Hotel Wallner, to its former glory. She’s not going to let anything get in her way – not her parents’ three-decade-long affair; not seemingly-random attacks by masked assassins; and especially not the broad-shouldered American foreign agent who’s saved her life two times already. No matter how luscious his mouth is.
Eli Whittaker also only wants one thing: to find out who is selling American secret codes across Europe, arrest them, and go home to his sensible life in Washington, DC. He has one lead – a letter the culprit sent from a Viennese hotel. But when he arrives in Vienna, he is immediately swept up into a chaotic whirlwind of balls, spies, waltzes, and beautiful hotelkeepers who seem to constantly find themselves in danger. He disapproves of all of it! But his disapproval is tested as he slowly falls deeper into the chaos – and as his attraction to said hotelkeeper grows.
I liked this overall but it kind of jumped the shark in the last quarter plotwise? I really liked the hero, and appreciated that he was ok with himself loosening up and starting to smile and laugh. The dawning friendship between him and the half brother and the spy was cute — it also hinted at setting up a future book, though since this book didn’t connect to the first that I was aware of, I’m not counting on it. I liked the heroine’s cook friend and her loving half brother, I wish she’d made more progress on asking for and accepting help from her friends and family over the book. I think a better understanding of the end of the Hapsburg empire would have made the subplot more interesting, because even with everything revealed I still wasn’t 100% sure I’d connected the pieces correctly.
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