I must admit to being a bit concerned initially, when the book seemed to focus very heavily on two rather quirky new characters, Gaspard and Konstantin.

Siblings Fintan and Flora are trying to get the hotel ready for opening at Christmas, while Fintan battles grief and Flora adapts to the new world of motherhood.You don’t need to read the earlier three books to enjoy this book, but it would help you to enjoy the development of the relationships between the characters. Constantine is a bit of a mystery (The reader is privy to his backstory but no one in town knows his truth).

Just picture inviting thirty or so people to your house for Christmas dinner and they are all staying for the weekend. In all honesty, part of my disappointment was due to my own stupidity: I picked this book up randomly and not knowing that it was the fourth book in a series. The plot involved major suspension of disbelief (a spoiled, lazy foreign prince is forced by his father to get a job in the kitchen of a hotel on a small Scottish island). Things like this just weren't necessary and were confusing to me as a well-established reader of the series.But there are some good subplots too - will Dr Saif ever find out whether his long-lost wife is still alive…? Suffice to say I am not the target audience, and I won't be reading any of the other books in the series. This book was different, as it introduced a lot of new characters into the mix and focused less on the usual cast of characters, but I was ok with that. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. A new French chef, Gaspard, arrives along with Konstantin, a mysterious kitchen assistant who has limited experience.

It did start off really slow and I was overwhelmed by the overload of characters and trying to keep them all straight, but each of their individual stories was heartwarming.There are some stream-of-consciousness passages, where a character's thoughts spill out, and that mostly works, but in other places I’d have preferred shorter sentences. There is a developing romance between Konstantin, a newcomer from Norway, and Isla, who used to work at the Island Cafe and is now working in the kitchen at the Rock. I loved soo many characters (Flora, Gaspard, Konstantin, Isla, and of course Agot and Bjårk) and just wish Mure was a real island I could go visit. Fintan goes off to Glasgow to interview chefs and brings back the only one willing to go to Mure, a tattooed, long-haired, Frenchman, named Gaspard. While the book ostensibly follows the love story between a shy island girl and a fellow kitchen worker (who is actually a disgraced Norwegian prince exiled by his father to learn to do.

Although he’s initially resentful, the place grows on him; he has never met anyone quite like Isla and her fellow Murians before. I don’t like the assumption that people are going to leap into bed at the first hint of attraction - it’s not something I’ve been aware of in any of my circles of friends and acquaintances, and there seems to be rather a lot of it in this book, albeit (thankfully) without any intimate details. There was no redeeming qualities in this novel and from start to finish the story was boring and bland. Fintan (with help from his sister Flora) I’d almost ready to open the island’s rambling and disused hotel, the Rock. The cleverly constructed storylines were engaging and relatable and packed with wry levity and amusing observations from a large cast of compellingly quirky and complex characters.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is still close enough to Christmas with a nip in the air, so I see no reason to stop reading Christmas stories, and this one was good fun and hit all the feels from the lows of grief and humiliation to the highs of a freshly acquired sense of purpose and pride as well as new and deepening love affairs.