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Monday, July 20, 2020

The Vacation Review


Author: T.M. Logan
Publisher: St. Martins Press
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Release Date: July 21, 2020
Purchase Link: Amazon

My Rating: 3 Secret Hearts


Special thanks to St. Martins Press for an arc of this book via Netgalley.
Synopsis & Author Bio following review.


Review:
Four women, friends since their university days, plan the perfect vacation in a luxurious villa in the south of France.  They're each turning forty and plan to celebrate in style.  Spouses and children tag along, and the drama begins.  Recently, Kate's husband has become distant, even cold, and after intercepting some text messages on his phone, she knows why.  An affair.  Her rock solid, handsome husband is having an affair.  What shocks her even more is that the other woman in this affair has to be one of her three trusted friends.  One of them has betrayed her.  Who is it?  Kate will uncover the truth during the next seven days while they're all together.  However, what she discovers may be worse than she expected.

The Vacation begins with a great premise - friends, vacation, a cheating husband, a deceitful friend.  I was immediately drawn into the story, scrutinizing each potential suspect, weighing the possibilities.  Kate is our main narrator, although there are others, but it's mostly through her voice that the story unfolds.  Through past and present chapters, secrets begin to spill, lies mount up, emotions boil over, and it soon becomes clear multiple people, including husbands and children, have something to hide.  While the author utilizes short chapters to move the pace forward over seven days, it began stalling out around mid-point for me - meandering a bit too much.  The focus of the story shifts somewhat and the pace slows more than I would have liked.  What started off as a page turner morphed into a slow burn mystery causing my interest to wander.  At this point, I had already solved part of the mystery but there was still the expected twist and shocker near the end.  The Vacation is a good domestic mystery that could have reached the next level with a little more focus and fewer pages in my opinion.  If you're a mystery fan, grab this one and decide for yourself.

My Rating:  3 Secret Hearts
Cross My Heart . . . xxx

Sandra

Synopsis:
Seven days. Three families. One killer.

It was supposed to be the perfect holiday - a group of families enjoying a week together in the sun. Four women who have been best friends for as long as they can remember making the most of a luxurious villa in the south of France.

But Kate has a secret: her husband is having an affair. And a week away might just be the perfect opportunity to get the proof she needs - to catch him in the act once and for all. Because she suspects the other woman is one of her two best friends.

One of them is working against her, willing to sacrifice years of friendship to destroy her family. But which one? As Kate closes in on the truth in the stifling Mediterranean heat, she realizes too late that the stakes are far higher than she ever imagined . . .

Because someone in the villa may be prepared to kill to keep their secret hidden.

Auth0r Bio:

Tim’s thrillers have sold more than 750,000 copies in the UK and are published in 15 countries around the world including the USA, South Korea, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and the Netherlands.

His debut thriller LIES was one of Amazon’s biggest selling e-books of 2017 and was followed by 29 SECONDS in 2018. His latest thriller, THE HOLIDAY, was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick for summer 2019 and spent ten weeks in the Sunday Times paperback top ten.

His next novel, THE CATCH, is about a father who becomes convinced his daughter is about to marry a man with terrible secrets. THE CATCH will be published in the UK on 11th June 2020.

Tim was born in Berkshire and studied in London and Cardiff before becoming a national newspaper journalist. He lives in Nottinghamshire with his wife and two children, and writes in a cabin at the bottom of his garden.

For exclusive writing and new releases from TM Logan, sign up to the Readers’ Club: www.bit.ly/TMLogan.

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