Reviews with content warning for Vomit - Hotel of Secrets

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.

——————

✨My Opinion✨

I’ve honestly never read a German based romance novel. It was interesting to see a glimpse of the times, but I didn’t get a very good picture of actual setting of Vienna or anything else other than the hotel itself. But the little historical political snippets were nice.

This book was all over the place. The first half of the book was specifically a suspense book, a super slow one where things didn’t even seem to be tied together. I started skimming fairly early on. Then all of a sudden it was very much a romance novel. Thankfully, the second half was interesting, but the espionage entangled ending was a big dud. It seems that exactly no agent/spy/traitor is good at their job… which makes for a bad book about espionage.

As far as characters go, The two main characters were fairly blah. Eli had no personality, with the excuse that his childhood trauma sucked it out of him. Tall, dark and never smiling/laughing before just isn’t enough to make a character interesting for me.

Maria was fine, but for such an independent and modern woman, had to be saved too many times for my liking.

*Thank you NetGalley and St. Martins press for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Content Warnings

skudiklier's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I really enjoyed this book! At first I wasn't sure if I'd love the writing, but by about a quarter of the way in I found myself too caught up in the story and characters to mind anymore. I found it really engaging and was very invested in what would happen, and in the romance. Slightly more spoilery/specific notes below:

(Also I normally wouldn't comment on the sex scenes specifically, good or bad, because that's embarrassing to me lmao. I would prefer to not acknowledge that when idk who will read this. So it's a mark of just how good they were that I feel the need to at least mention it in my review!)

Sometimes I start a (straight) romance and the male lead is described as so rude and humorless that I have no idea how they're going to bring me around to liking him by the end, or thinking he's a good fit for the female lead. This was one of those, but Biller did indeed end up putting me firmly on the side of the relationship! I love them together and really enjoyed this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the chance to read and review this ARC.

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