Spoiler warning! This is the fifth story in the Innkeeper Chronicles series, and this review may contain spoilers for previous installments. If you want to start at the beginning, Clean Sweep is the first book.
For Innkeepers, the biggest and most sacred holiday of the year is the Treaty Stay, which commemorates the ancient treaty between the first Inns, their intergalactic guests, and the agreement to keep humans safe and completely unaware of the presence of alien visits to Earth. During a Treaty Stay, Inns have to open the doors to anyone who seeks lodging, which is how Dina and Sean, who have only barely managed to recover from the last very dramatic events at Gertrude Hunt, find themselves preparing to host not only a large flock of philosophically minded and argumentative space chickens (no, really) but an extremely powerful and notoriously difficult to please space warlord, who has some sort of important meeting she needs to attend to on Earth.
Orro, Dina’s neurotic perfectionist of a chef drives himself nearly mad trying to produce the food request that the warlord has asked for as her first meal. He’s also gotten himself addicted to fast-paced reality cooking shows. Sean is having fun upgrading the inn’s defenses, which is urgently needed, considering the ruthless businessman that their alien guest is meeting with keeps trying to send mercenaries to break into the inn. Dina still feels a bit lost and out of touch with her Inn after the near-death experience she’s still recovering from. She worries that she won’t have the full control and power she requires to see to the safety and well being of all of her guests during the Treaty Stay.
This was a holiday novella that Ilona and Gordon (the writing team that make up Ilona Andrews), as always first released in free installments on their website and then published for fans to buy. It made my Christmas and New Year’s holidays a happier place to be, certainly.
Full review can be found here.