Books Read: Karen Aldous - The Chateau

Can young hearts ease a restless spirit?

On the shores of stunning Lake Geneva, Gina Remy is celebrating her brother’s wedding – when the figure of a woman appears hovering above the water, beckoning to her. Ghostly visitations do not happen to Gina - a self-confessed control freak with her own successful property business, she prides herself on being level-headed. But as she is tormented by dreams and visions, her perfect life begins to unravel, and she knows she needs to help this ghost find peace if she’s to get any of her own!

Enter Ollie Martin, an Anglo-Swiss property developer who’s sexy as hell and knows it. His arrogance annoys Gina, but he’s the only one who will take her seriously… and the closer they come to understanding the quest the ghost has set for them, the closer they get to one another…

Amazon links: Kindle

The Chateau is another one of the eBooks that I downloaded from NetGalley last year that has been sat on my Kindle so although I initially joined up for this blog tour for a non-review slot it has given me the perfect opportunity to review it now and clear another book from my backlog!

When we first meet Gina it's clear that she's having problems with her longtime boyfriend Max about the future of their relationship, she's desperate for a family but he wants to wait plus he already has two daughters from a previous relationship, so she's confused about the strong attraction she feels for Ollie who she she meets at her brother's wedding in Switzerland.

Over time Gina's feelings for both Max and Ollie continued to cause her confusion especially as Max is being mysterious and hiding something and Gina's path continues to cross with Ollie, both on a personal basis when she visits her family in Switzerland, and professionally when he asks her to manage the selling of his properties.  The classic mixed feelings at play...

But it's clear that something else is also at play as strange dreams and visions seem to draw Gina and Ollie closer as they try to solve what they mean.  I have to admit that I wasn't really sure whether the ghost element of the storyline would put me off as I'm not really a fan of anything supernatural but it actually added an interesting twist that I was intrigued enough to see how it all played out. 

Although Gina is so self assured in her professional life at times I felt like I wanted to shake her as she wasn't so assured in her personal life as she seems to let others take her for granted. And as for Ollie, I initially thought that he was cocky so didn't really like him but I have to admit that by the end I was a little in love with him myself!    
I adored the settings within this book, having never been to Switzerland or Venice, the descriptive writing from Karen Aldous really drew me in and I could picture the scenery of Lake Geneva, Ollie's villas, the Chateau near the lake and the Venice waterways.  These places all sounded stunning and somewhere I would love to visit one day.  

Having enjoyed The Chateau, I'm now going to move Karen's debut novel The Vineyard to the top of my reading list as this is another one of the books from last year I neglected.

As part of her blog tour Karen Aldous is running a giveway to win a £10 Amazon voucher, enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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