THE VACATION (2020)

The Vacation by T.M. Logan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having read TM Logan's first two books (Lies and 29 Seconds), I was thrilled to have the opportunity to read The Vacation. I'm a fan of stories set in isolated places.

THE STORY:  Four college friends who meet every year to reminisce and catch-up, decide to bring their families along to a luxurious villa in the south of France.

Kate, who tells the story, has just discovered text messages between her husband and what appears to be one of her best friends who will be along on the vacation.

All the characters, adults and children alike, are unpleasant people self-centered, willing to betray and lie, making it hard to care about them.

FIRST LINE: "We drove north, away from the coast."

WHAT I THOUGHT: The story is told by Kate in the first person interspersed with chapters named for other events and characters that are told in the third person and fill in parts of the puzzle pieces.

Another title might be "How to Draw Bad Conclusions". Kate is an annoying character. Considering that she has been a crime analyst for 13 years with the Metropolitan Police, her mode of reasoning is to jump to conclusions. The repetition of her fabricated worries while mostly neglecting her children is disturbing.

There are plenty of teasers and red herrings and a set-up for an unexpected ending. T.M. Logan comes up with some interesting plot ideas and then fills them with twists and turns that will keep you up late.

BOTTOM LINE:RECOMMENDED. This is going to be another popular book by T.M. Logan. Earlier titles were Lies (2018) and 29 Seconds (2019). Click on the book title to see my reviews. It was published in 2019 as The Holiday in the U.K. and will be released in July 2020 in the U.S. as The Vacation.

Take this book to the beach but don't take it too seriously. Just enjoy the twists, turns, and red herrings the author has created for your enjoyment.

Disclaimer: A copy of The Vacation was provided to me by /Net Galley for an honest review.

Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Press (July21, 2020)
ISBN-10: 1250270774
ISBN-13: 978-1250270771

TM Logan was a national newspaper journalist before turning to novel-writing full time. His thrillers have sold more than 750,000 copies in the UK and are published in 19 countries around the world.

His debut thriller Lies was one of Amazon UK's biggest ebooks of 2017 - winning a Silver Award at the Nielsen Bestseller Awards - and was followed by his second standalone, 29 Seconds (2018). The Holiday spent ten weeks in the Sunday Times paperback Top 10, as well as hitting the #1 spots on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks and Kobo. His brand new thriller for 2020, The Catch, is about a father who becomes convinced his daughter is about to marry a man with terrible secret

Tim lives in Nottinghamshire with his wife and two children, and writes in a cabin at the bottom of his garden.