Sparkles!

Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller   

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What a delight. Set in Vienna in 1878, this has everything. Spies, murder attempts, romance—all framed against the background of the Hotel Wallner, it’s owners and the scandals surrounding them.

A time of balls and waltzes, culminating with the Hotelkeeper’s Ball. A Ball the hotel has been requested to host once again as their competition who had taken over that role when the Wallner was no longer at its peak had suffered a burst pipe and water damage.

The hotel has been managed for seventy-five years by the Wallner women. Currently Maria was the manager, advised by her grandmother Josephine. Her mother Elisabeth had not been interested in running the hotel. After it had declined in popularity, and suffered losses and setbacks, Elisabeth had passed the responsibility onto her daughter Maria. Maria was  focused on returning the Hotel to its former place of preeminence in Viennese circles.

“It had been given to [her] great-grandmother Theresa along with an Imperial decree allowing her and her descendants to operate it before that particular love affair had…deteriorated. The legend is they fall in love with a dark stranger, have one daughter and never marry. The running of the hotel passes from mother to daughter. Every night they write down their observations in a secret journal. Needless to say they can count their antecedents back to royalty.”

Eli Whittaker has been sent by the American state department to find out who’s been selling their codes to the Russians. However things aren’t as simple as they appear.

On the surface Eli is a clockwork, humorless official / spy, undeniably handsome. Eli however is so much more

His first night in Vienna, New Year’s Eve, he saves a drunken woman from a runaway carriage, who tells him that above all they can’t sleep together. Strange!?

The woman turns out to be the proprietor of his hotel. An interesting beginning for all.

This was not a fairytale and yet the joy and love contained within the story almost made it so.

A magical setting with an unexpected beginning, an intriguing middle and an all you could wish for ending.

A St. Martin’s Press ARC via NetGalley.                                              

Many thanks to the author and publisher.

Please note: Quotes taken from an advanced reading copy maybe subject to change