"Dina DeMille isn't your typical Bed and Breakfast owner. Her inn defies laws of physics, her dog is secretly a monster, and the only permanent guest of the inn is a former Galactic tyrant with a price on her head. The inn needs guests to thrive and guests have been scarce, so when an Arbitrator shows up at Dina's door and asks her to host a peace summit between three warring species, she jumps on the chance. Unfortunately, for Dina, bridging the gap between space vampires, the Hope Crushing Horde, and the merchants of Baha-char is much easier said than done. To make the summit a success, she must find a chef, remodel the inn, keep her guests from murdering each other, and risk everything, even her life, to save the man she might fall in love with. But then it's all in the day's work for an Innkeeper"--
I'm a huge fan of Ilona Andrews' writing (or, at least, her Kate Daniels series) so I was inclined to like this to start with; it's a testament to her writing that I did in spite of the undercurrent of science fiction running through the storyline.
I'm not sure if I should admit that my favourite character is Caldenia, but she is. She gets all the best lines and if not for the cannibalistic tendencies, she might be my literary heroine of choice. But Dina is no slouch either and while there's never any doubt she has the abilities, her overwhelming innkeeper mandate sometimes makes her a bit trod-upon, so that final scene was awesome. It's nice to see her abilities balance out; that she can be as bad as she can be good.
I never doubted for a minute who Turan Adin really was, it could never have been anyone else, but I couldn't figure out how Andrews was going to explain the timing. Once she did, I was left wondering what the vampires and hoard thought about the "mysterious creature". I also thought it interesting that Andrews dropped a huge clue about Dina's brother but then never followed up on it; ditto the clue about what happened to her parents. I suppose they're saving that for book three.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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23 June, 2017:
Finished reading
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23 June, 2017:
Reviewed