Books Read: Molly Hopkins - It Happened in Venice

Welcome to Venice - the city of Love

He cheated, but only once!  Evie Dexter has promised to forgive her fiance Rob - and her efforts to absolve his sins are paying off.  In the past ten days she's only called him a love-rat eleven times.

Thank goodness her flourishing career as a tour guide takes her to fashionable Dublin, in-vogue Marrakech and cool Amsterdam.  And when Evie's offered a luxury visit to the sensual city of Venice she jumps at the chance.  With its delicious wine and sultry Italian men, four days in the city of light and love, is just what she needs.  

Although I'd heard great things about Molly Hopkins debut book, It Happened in Paris, it was a book that I hadn't had a chance to read yet so when I received a copy of It Happened in Venice from Madeleine at Little Brown Book Group, I quickly bought a copy to read before I could start to read and review this book.

I'm definitely glad that I did read It Happened in Paris first so that I could understand the back story of Evie and Rob's relationship, and how she came to be a travel rep in the first place, although I'm sure I could have picked up the plot without doing so.

It seems that no sooner than they are engaged Rob wants to pin Evie down to become a suburban housewife, which is not something I could ever picture her to be, as he wants her to sell her flat so that they can buy a family house.  However, this is the complete opposite to what Evie wants, she likes living in her cosy flat with her flatmate Lulu plus she's not sure she completely trusts him after finding out about him cheating on her.  I'm please to see that she's a strong enough character not to be pushed into doing something she doesn't want to.

As well as Evie and Rob, some of the other characters from the first book are back, including Lulu who seems such a hoot (although I'm not sure I could cope with her as a flatmate!), sister Lexy and neighbour Nikki as well as some delightful new characters that she meets through her job during her tours throughout Europe.

It's actually quite hard to review this book without giving too much of the story away as there were so many funny moments that I'd like to mention but this would probably spoil it for readers but one I will mention is the problems she has to overcome when a client who wasn't expected turns up on a tour, after giving up her room where will she sleep?  I will also say that there was a twist which I just didn't see coming, I do like it when that happens as so often these days you can tell from some point during the book how it's all going to turn out and this was definitely not the case in this book.

There was just one small niggle for me about the book though and that's the title, it led me to believe that a lot more of the storyline would be based in Venice than it actually was, but apart from that I did enjoy the book.

I read both of these books in just over 3 days as they were so easy to read and enjoyable to read, whichever book I was reading went everywhere with me so that I could read a chapter whenever I had a few spare minutes.

I'm already hoping that Molly will be writing a further book in this series and can't wait to see where Evie ends up next.  I've also just downloaded her novella, It Happened at Boot Camp, which is a standalone short story of what happens when Evie and Lulu sign up for a week and I cannot wait to see what hilarious situations they find themselves in .