Book Review: Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies by Catherine Mack (Vacation Mysteries #1)

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Some good twists; setting

Cons: Pacing slowed down by drama from shallow characters; not as clever as it thinks it is

The Bottom Line:

Killer vacation

Characters I did not like

Book thinks it’s clever

Don’t Bother Booking This Vacation

When I first heard about Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies, I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, so I pre-ordered it. Then I started seeing early reviews, which were decidedly mixed. So it was with a little trepidation that I sat down to read it. Sadly, I wasn’t that impressed. 

The book follows Eleanor Dash, an author who had a runaway best seller when her first novel debuted ten years ago. She’d based it pretty closely on something that had happened to her while on vacation in Rome, just changing the names to protect everyone. While almost every name. She couldn’t bring herself to rename Connor Smith, the hero of the story and now her ex-boyfriend. The result is that he is still a part of her life whether she wants him to be or not. 

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the debut, Eleanor’s publisher is sending her on a promotional tour through Italy with fans as well as people associated with the books. Including Connor. While Eleanor contemplates ways to kill Connor in her next book, someone else is contemplating ways to kill the real Connor in real life. Will Eleanor figure out what is going on? Does she even want to?

To be honest, one of the first things that drew me to this book was the fact that it had footnotes in it.  Yes, footnotes in a novel.  The only other time I had run across this was in Lisa Lutz’s Spellman Files books, which I absolutely loved.  And the footnotes in those books were funny and creative, so they were one of my favorite parts.  That wasn’t the case here.  Yes, a handful of them were clever.  However, the rest, were pointless and self-indulgent.  At times, they took us away from the story.  Other times, they were things that should have been in the text, like character descriptions.  The ones that worked for me were snarky asides.

Since our main character is an author, writing the book in first person, we get comments about writing throughout the book.  Most of these are in the footnotes.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a meta moment or comment as much as the next person.  In fact, those can be some of my favorite moments in somethings when they are done well.  Here, they just didn’t work.  We get things like footnotes that said, “This is foreshadowing.”  Yes, I knew that.  Thanks.  Since the humor was supposed to come from things like this, it didn’t work for me.

Then there’s the fact that I didn’t care for many of the characters at the beginning.  Eleanor could have gotten rid of much of the drama in her life by simply changing Connor’s name in her first novel.  Then there’s her relationship with her sister, which gets hung up over literally nothing.  And let’s not talk about the fact that Eleanor herself seems to have a personality that is at complete odds with her backstory.  Sorry, but I’m just not buying it.  Yes, the characters did grow over the course of the novel, and I liked them better near the end of the book, but that wasn’t enough to truly make up for how they were at the beginning.

So let’s talk plot.  Yes, there were some good twists to it, but they were buried in too much else.  The mystery itself was rather slow.  Instead, we got all kinds of character drama that stemmed from the shallow characters.  Even as we enter act three (which, of course, is pointed out to us), we still get sidetracked by all the talk about writing.

In the end, this felt like a book where the author felt she was being clever, but it didn’t actually work that way, mainly because it was drawing attention to how clever it was.

I also have to call out the foul language in the book.  It seemed a bit too much at the beginning of the story, but it did get a bit more realistic later on in the book.  And I especially have to do this since the author used a footnote to complain about people who call out foul language in reviews.  I hope you are happy that someone did it for this book.  Also, this keeps the book outside of the cozy realm.

On the other hand, I did enjoy the virtual trip to Italy.  The locations were fun.

I was curious enough about Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies, that I’m glad I picked up the book.  But I won’t be continuing on with the teased sequel.