This time around it was that very catchy title which caught my attention. Having recently been blown away by the fabulous Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz – I was keen to find another clever, quirky whodunit. Would this one tick that box?
BLURB: All that bestselling author Eleanor Dash wants is to get through her book tour in Italy and kill off her main character, Connor Smith, in the next in her Vacation Mysteries series―is that too much to ask?
Clearly, because when an attempt is made on the real Connor’s life―the handsome but infuriating con man she got mixed up with ten years ago and now can’t get out of her life―Eleanor’s enlisted to help solve the case.
Contending with literary rivals, rabid fans, a stalker―and even her ex, Oliver, who turns up unexpectedly―theories are bandied about, and rivalries, rifts, and broken hearts are revealed. But who’s really trying to get away with murder?
REVIEW: I’m very aware that getting access to arcs is a huge privilege – but these days, I do find my heart sinking when I open up my Kindle and find the digital arc has been taken from the paperback version, rather than the ebook. And the reason it makes a difference, is that the headers and page numbers necessary in a paperback get muddled up with the text on my Kindle, causing a major distraction. Usually, I suck it up without making a fuss. But this time around, there was another layer of distraction – because Mack also sprinkled footnotes throughout after the style of the late great Terry Pratchett. And footnotes are something else my poor old Kindle doesn’t cope with very well. I think some of them were quite amusing. But as they turned up at least a couple of pages after the sentence or passage being referenced and Life is too short to flip back to refresh my recollection, given there were over 200 footnotes. So I gritted my teeth and powered through the very disrupted text, but I can’t deny that it impacted upon my enjoyment.
That said, I liked Eleanor. Punchy and feisty, she initially seems quite comfortable being a best-selling crime novelist. I found it endearing that she didn’t take herself, or her profession, too seriously. But as the story unfolds, we learn her apparently offhand attitude to the world is a veneer stapled on to hide some major emotional wounds. She and her sister unexpectedly lost their parents when teenagers – and they both had to grow up fast in order to survive. Eleanor also had a particularly traumatic love affair, where she was badly betrayed by someone who she’d trusted and cared deeply about. Worse, the man in question is still in her life – in fact, he’s inextricably caught up in her success, whether she wants him around or not.
She’s now celebrating ten years of having been published and is working on the tenth book of the series. And the Publicity Department at her publishing house has pulled out all the stops and put together a book tour in Italy. She is being accompanied by several other crime authors and a selection of some of her most committed fans, who won a competition to be able to also take part in the tour. But almost from the first, things start going badly wrong…
We have a satisfying pool of suspects alongside Eleanor, as first another member of the group is convinced he’s being targeted. But Eleanor gradually comes to believe she is the actual victim as various members of the group come under attack.
What sets this one apart, is Mack’s willingness to strip away the fourth wall and talk directly to her readers about the mechanics of how a successful crime novel works. As an author, I didn’t find the details revealed particularly jarring as I’m aware of the ploys being used to keep the pages turning. It was a refreshing spin – I particularly appreciated Mack’s discussion of Agatha Christie’s books.
I got to the denouement at the same time that Eleanor realises who the culprit is and found I was thoroughly rooting for her. All in all, this is an enjoyable, well-executed murder mystery with lots of charm – though I’d recommend the audiobook as apparently the footnotes are far more successful in that format. While I obtained an arc of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
8/10
Brainfluff 