Review: Spend the Night - Episode #1 - Elizabeth Lee

Review: Spend the Night - Episode #1 - The Hotel Collection -  Elizabeth Lee - March 2015

Oh, friends can I be honest with you for a moment? This past month has been an absolute whirlwind. Work has been chaotic with a capital C, and my beloved reading time has taken the hit in a big way. You know that feeling when you sit down with a book and your brain just… won't? Everything felt flat. Nothing was clicking. I'd pick something up, read a few pages, and put it right back down again. It was that kind of month.

So I did what any self-respecting bookworm does in times of reading drought ,I went rummaging through my Kindle. And tucked away in there, gathering digital dust, was a little stash of serial novels from way back when they were absolutely the thing. You remember that era, right? Those delicious bite-sized instalments that kept you coming back for more? I had a handful saved precisely for moments like this, and Spend the Night by Elizabeth Lee was exactly what I needed to break through the reading slump.

The story centres on Hannah, a woman who has been groomed from the ground up to take the reins of the prestigious Wellesley-Crawford hotel as CEO when her grandmother steps down. It's a legacy business with deep roots founded by her grandparents alongside their best friend from the Crawford family. Over the years, though, the Crawford side of things drifted away from the day-to-day running of the hotel. They became silent partners, happy to collect their share of the profits and swan in when the mood struck. The Wellesley family carried the weight, and that was simply that.

Until now. Enter Trent Crawford, the youngest of the Crawford clan who has decided he rather fancies the top job for himself. Suddenly Hannah has a very real, very unexpected rival nipping at her heels. The competition is on, and the tension between the two of them carries the story along at a nice clip.

Now, I'll be straight with you this was a borderline 3 Ps read for me, and honestly, if it had been any longer, I might have quietly set it aside. The plot is engaging enough and the rivalry between Hannah and Trent has potential, but the book ends on a cliffhanger that left me feeling a little dangled rather than delighted. It's clearly designed to pull you into the next instalment, which is very much in the tradition of serial fiction,  I just wanted a touch more resolution before we got there.

That said? For a slow reading month, it did exactly what I needed it to do. It was easy, it was quick, it moved and sometimes that is genuinely enough.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4vjTpT7