This I Promise You

The sole surprise in this novel is that veteran romance writer Stern has produced such a relentlessly dull story. When Karl-Gustav Becker of Baden-Baden's swank Waldhotel Becker dies, the family business is left to Tilla, his daughter. She hires an unscrupulous manager who runs off with both the funds and Eva-Maria, her bitchy daughter. Tilla's other daughter, angelic Kati, stays to pick up the pieces: her beloved father's suicide, her mother's depression and affair with another swindler, the loss of the hotel, and other tribulations. Before Kati's final triumph, Stern monotonously retreads the same ground: the first torrid sex scene is followed by others less inventive, and the whole is padded too generously with lessons in hotel management so that, while the story contains many elements of a conventional romance, it lacks the genre's elan vital. BOMC alternate. (Mar.)