Murder Month 2023 - The Holiday Home

So, February's reading plan was a bit of a car crash. Mainly because my brain didn't want to read what you guys voted for and, at the same time, I was quitting a lot of reads or, if I did stay and finish them off, I was very "Meh" over it. And it felt like I still was in a crime reading frame of mind, rather than going to fantasy and teen, which is my reading bread and butter. Because of this, March is going to be the blog's "Murder Month". I've done this in the past, where I do a theme month of focusing on crime/thriller stories. And I have a good few on my radar that I was to devour before the Easter blog holiday (and I have an idea for a themed reading month for April as well (more about that after my Easter blog break). 

But let's start this murdery month off which a review and let's go with a thriller author I discovered last month and am slowly devouring...

Title and Author: The Holiday Home by Daniel Hurst

Publisher: Bookouture

Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: eProof and Audiobook gifted by UK publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Two couples go away to a remote cabin in Scotland. The wives have known each other since Sixth Form and the husbands barely get along. But a holiday away will do wonders, right? So when one of the wives overhears something that she shouldn't have, it starts a chain reaction which will end with no all of them coming home alive...

As you know, over the past few weeks, I have binged two other of Daniel's thrillers - The Couple In The Cabin and The Doctor's Wife - and I hoped that this would be the same. I would fly through this and while they would be insane, soap-opera style twists, I wouldn't be able to put this down. 

Alas, that wasn't the case. 

Out of the three, this was the weakest. It was the slowest to pick up the pace and reveal the reader what was going on and why (whereas with The Doctor's Wife and The Couple in the Cabin, we knew what caused the stories to spiral out of control and the pace to pick up almost immediately). 

All the characters seem to make really dumb decisions and choices with no real logic or understanding why (with the previous two books, even when the characters were making outrageous decisions, you understood their logic over why they were behaving the way they were) and some of the writing decisions were odd. A good example is we have a young character who is aged 11 and yet, her behaviour and the way she was spoken to was to a child much younger... 

But it was fun and it's a perfect thriller to read by the pool on holiday. But, if I had to recommend a Daniel Hurst book to start with, it wouldn't be The Holiday Home.