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 read ‘Clean Sweep’, the first book of the Innkeeper Chronicles, back in 2017 and was surprised by how much fun it was. I’ve been meaning to get back to Dina Demille and her sentient and magically powerful Inn that opens portals into other worlds and secretly hosts alien races ever since, but I kept ending up reading a Kate Daniels novel instead. I don’t have any more Kate available to me so I went back to Dina and her Inn.

In ‘Sweep In Peace‘ Dina has agreed to let the galactic arbitrators use the inn to host a peace conference between Space Vampires, the Hope-Crushing Horde, and the devious Merchants of Baha-char. 

The opening of the book was a little clumsy and I wondered if this ten-year-old book had become dated and was going todeliver what now seems like clichèd video game characters in a static situation. There was a lot of visualisation of exotic architecture interwoven with briefings on the main parties to the peace talks and some of the issues involved. There also seemed to be an assumption that I hadn’t read the first book so answers to the “What is an Inn and what do Innkeepers do?” questions had to be folded into the story. This got things off to a slow start.

The pace improved once the large cast was assembled. 

Initially, I was propelled by the humour and my curiosity. If you’re not interested in the choices an Innkeeper makes to match the interior design of a room to the character of a guest or the kinds of food that a first-class chef can produce then your attention may flag for a while. 

Bit by bit, the emotional tone changed and I began to empathise with the terrible situation the warring parties were in.Their war was unwinnable, casualties were mounting and none of them could find a way to stop the slaughter. I admired how Ilona Andrews turned the abstract into the personal and, along the way, showed that the combatants, even though they were sworn enemies, had a lot in common. I was also interested to see how ruthlessly manipulative the Arbitrator felt he needed to be to bring about peace. 

As always with Ilona Andrews, the magic systems in the book were carefully thought through and vividly visualised. I found the ceremony used by the Hope-Crushing Horde to remember their dead particuarly affecting. 

Although this is a book with a lot of humour and a little romance, in the end, it is about what wars do to the people who fight them and the price that often has to be paid for peace.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Renee Raudman. Her narration is something of an acquired taste. My first impression was that she sounded too old to be narrating Dina Demille’s point of view. After a while, I was carried forward by the passion she brought to her narration and her ability to give characters distinctive voices. Her narration shapes the feel of the text so you’ll either love it, or want to switch to a text version.