I loved the storyline, just like all the other books in the series. And books are always better when you love all the main characters (ALMOST all). A few issues though:
Writing style. The dialogue tends towards artificial and stilted. Many times when Ann talks, it sounds like someone writing an email rather than communicating verbally and face-to-face. But the phone calls were the worst. Literally every time someone got a phone call, they'd answer the phone and immediately go into what was on their mind. No hellos or how-are-yous or seeing what was on the caller's mind before starting in. It was very unrealistic and inauthentic, and super rude. This is minor, but because there were so many phone calls it really stuck out.
Whenever Rhonda talked, I got the image of an all-brawn-and-no-brains bull-in-China-shop who has to rely on brute force instead of intelligence and business savvy to get things done. She offered very little to the takeover process outside of money and the original buy-back idea, and the rest of book making threats to anyone who stands in their way and coming close to divulging secrets several times. She seemed more like a liability than a partner, and could have been so much more in this book, a more lovable character like she was in the prior books. Her "dialect" didn't help. Every "ya" instead of "you" was very awkward and, again, felt artificial, and even forced, and it didn't enhance her character at all.
VAUGHN. This bothered me in the previous books too, Vaughn honestly seems like a selfish a--hole a lot of the time, especially when it comes to his work vs. Ann's. When they met, she was in the middle of her rebirth, and take it from someone who has had to rebirth herself as an independent single mother, that is a VERY meaningful experience and not one that you'd easily let go of. But in previous books, Vaughn was so unsupportive of the time the hotel required of Ann, expecting her to always be readily available, at his beck and call, whenever he was able to make an unexpected visit, and as if his work was so much more important than hers, that she should be the one to give up her work almost completely while he could carry on in his job miles away from his family. And in this book, it's no different. He reminds her multiple times that he doesn't want the hotel to interfere with their family and her responsibilities, which is really rich coming from someone who was rarely ever even in the same state as his family, let alone being intimately involved in the day-to-day running of the household and family life. And he took SO LONG to stand up for his marriage in this book, allowing the world to think he was a philanderer, leaving Ann to several awkward conversations having to dispel rumors, not contacting her for days at a time, and then being short with her and cutting her off in phone calls. Honestly, I think in the real world, an agent who couldn't do better for an incredibly successful client doesn't sound like he's worth sh*t, but Vaughn acted like it was a completely helpless situation. He's the one character I just don't like. He can be great, but for me, he can also be selfish, whiny, inconsiderate, and jerky, and for me, those features override his good qualities.
Why kill off so many characters? It didn't add anything to the story to kill Sabine and Tina's brother. It's not like killing a character off a series when you or they don't want to renew their contract. It just seemed like unnecessary tragedy.
Lastly, what about the mystery of the beach hut arson???? Unless leaving this open-ended was a setup for another sequel, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get rid of Brock Goodwin once and for all. No one even considered him being the culprit even though he was quickest to try to capitalize on its destruction. He's an obnoxious character that I wouldn't miss from the series if Keim decides to have him imprisoned for arson next book?