Catherine Mack: Every Time I go on Vacation Someone Dies

In Catherine Mack's debut novel, it shows how a vacation can turn from good to bad to worse:

All Eleanor wants to do is get through the latest book tour. The Pros is that it is taking place in Italy, the MAJOR Con is that her ex and blackmailer and muse for the male lead in the series, Connor is also going to be on the tour. That is why Eleanor has decided to finally Kill Connor, well not in real life, but in her series so that she can move on and start writing something different. But when someone tries to kill Connor in real life, and the only thing they know that there is only 10 days to figure out who the killer is, but as other bodies start falling, the suspect list keeps getting shorter. This is the vacation to die for, literally. 

As a debut novel I appreciate that Mack was trying to do something a bit different here with the format of the book and how all the information is laid out and I think that Mack succeeded on some points but not on others. I really enjoyed the ideas that Mack presented of an author who's first book is based upon real events of her vacation as well as that the book was only told from Eleanor's POV. However, I wasn’t a fan of the format of Eleanor talking to the readers instead of just telling the story and the never-ending footnotes. I can say that I did not read all the footnotes. Also how does this translate in other formats like audio, are the footnotes at the end of each chapters?

I did like the overall plot of this book and I think that Mack did a good job of placing people against each other, and determining that the killer was in or connected to their group in some ways. I also thought that the methods of murder were different from a lot of books that I read. I was able to figure out most of the twist before the end.

I’m not sure a ever like Eleanor as a character, she was annoying a lot of the time, and pretty selfish throughout the book, even when she realizes that she was being selfish she never changes from being so. But I did like she is an unreliable narrator as we only get her POV and there are always 2 sides of the story you know as the reader you are not getting all the information or sides to the relationship and story.

This book really took me down memory lane from a trip to Italy 10 years ago and that was probably the best part of the book, getting to relive some of my own memories.

This book was just not for me. I think that Mack tried to do a bit too much with this book and that lead it to not be for me.

Cheers!!!!!

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