L'affaire (Johnson, Diane)

The Story

Amy Hawkins, a young dot-com executive from California who has made her fortune at the top of NASDAQ sets off for Europe to find culture, her roots, and maybe a cause to devote her considerable fortune to. Amy starts her quest at one of the finest small hotels in the French Alps--a hotel noted for skiing and its famous cooking lessons--in the town of Valmeri, amid art assortment of Eurotrash aristocrats and ski enthusiasts. She has no plans to fall in love. On the first afternoon, she is nearly swept away by an avalanche (started, some say, by low-flying American warplanes). Two of the hotel's guests, esteemed English publisher Adrian Venn and his much younger American wife, Kerry, weren't as fortunate as Amy. Both lie comatose in a nearby hospital. When Adrian's children--young, old, legitimate, illegitimate--assemble in Valmeri to protect their interests should he not pull through. Amy finds the Hotel Croix St. Bernard a more difficult place. Here is British Rupert; his voluptuous sister. Posy; a French daughter, Victoire; her handsome husband; and their little half-brother, Harry, Kerry's eighteen-month-old baby, being cared for by Kerry's fourteen-year-old brother. Kip. Amy, already suspect as an American, finds that her nationality freezes the social climate as she steps in to assist the struggling Kip. She sets in motion a series of events in France and England that spotlight ancient national differences, customs, and laws, all leavened by American attit