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From the bestselling author of Burying the Honeysuckle Girls comes a riveting novel about a mother and daughter separated by grief, secrets, and a conspiracy that threatens to destroy their lives.

If there’s a healthy way to grieve, Erin Gaines hasn’t found it. After her husband’s sudden death, the runaway success of the tech company they built with their best friends has become overwhelming. Her nerves are frayed, she’s disengaged, and her frustrated daughter, Shorie, is pulling away from her. Maybe Erin’s friends and family are right. Maybe a few weeks at a spa resort in the Caribbean islands is just what she needs to hit the reset button…

Shorie is not only worried about her mother’s mental state but also for the future of her parents’ company. Especially when she begins to suspect that not all of Erin’s colleagues can be trusted. It seems someone is spinning an intricate web of deception—the foundation for a conspiracy that is putting everything, and everyone she loves, at risk. And she may be the only one who can stop it.

Now, thousands of miles away in a remote, and oftentimes menacing, tropical jungle, Erin is beginning to have similar fears. Things at the resort aren’t exactly how the brochure described, and unless she’s losing her mind, Erin’s pretty sure she wasn’t sent there to recover—she was sent to disappear.

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MY REVIEW

Erin Gaines, her husband, and two friends created a tech company that has started to take off. Erin’s husband died unexpectedly, and Erin is grieving his loss. Her daughter Shorie is leaving for college, but wants to stay home and work at her parents company. Between their grieving and difference of opinions regarding Shorie’s future, the mother-daughter relationship has become strained. Erin is encouraged to go to an exclusive spa for help, but it turns out the spa is not the relaxing resort experience she was expecting.

Told with alternating viewpoints – Erin and Shorie. Erin is grieving, working too much, and doesn’t seem to be taking care of herself. Shorie is smart and resourceful, and wants to work with her parent’s tech company rather than go to college. Erin and Shorie love each other, but their relationship is strained with what is currently happening in their lives. Erin’s friends and family encourage her to attend a spa on a private island to help her get back on track. The island resort turns into a dangerous experience. While Erin is away on the island, Shorie starts to look into some questionable activity going on with the tech company.

Until the Day I Die is an exciting thriller, especially the parts that take place in the jungle of the private island. This book combines a mystery at a tech company and a perilous island experience. Overall, a wild, mysterious, and fast-paced page turner.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Books by Emily Carpenter:

1. Burying the Honeysuckle Girls
2. The Weight of Lies
3. Every Single Secret
4. Until the Day I Die
5. Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters

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Everyone’s invited…everyone’s a suspect…

During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.

The trip begins innocently enough: admiring the stunning if foreboding scenery, champagne in front of a crackling fire, and reminiscences about the past. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year’s Eve, the cord holding them together snaps, just as a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.

Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead. . . and another of them did it.

Keep your friends close, the old adage says. But how close is too close?

DON’T BE LEFT OUT. JOIN THE PARTY NOW.

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MY REVIEW

A group of old university friends take a trip to celebrate New Year’s together. They travel to a remote estate in the Scottish Highlands. Within a few days, tensions have risen, secrets are revealed, and someone dies.

The character list for this novel is fairly long, with eleven guests plus a baby staying at the estate and three employees working there. The employees are Heather, Doug, and Iain. The university friends are Miranda, Katie, Julien, Mark, Nick, and Samira. Miranda and Julien are now married. Katie is single and traveling alone. Mark is married to Emma. Nick is dating Bo. Samira is married to Giles, and they have a baby, Priya. In addition to this friend group traveling together, an Icelandic couple, Ingvar and Kristin, are also staying at the estate.

With so many characters, it is not surprising that multiple points of view are used in this novel. The viewpoints are Heather, Doug, Miranda, Katie, and Emma. The switching POVs are seamless, and are easily distinguished from one another. The story is told over a three day period, using a flashback approach. The stories open with the “Now” where a body is discovered. Then the events of the preceding days are told, flipping between what happened in the preceding days to the events in the “Now” timeline. This novel has a lot happening, but I found it easy to follow and never got confused with the who and when of the story.

As for the plot, The Hunting Party is an intriguing mystery. While a dead body is found right off the bat, the identity of the deceased is not known until near the end of the story. So, not only was I trying to guess who the killer was, but also who the victim was.

I enjoy this type of mystery. A group of people in an isolated location. A murder. Secret and lies. Dysfunctional friendships and drama. The Hunting Party is such an entertaining read. Highly recommended.

I received a digital copy of this book via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

Books by Lucy Foley:

1. The Hunting Party
2. The Guest List
3. The Paris Apartment
4. The Midnight Feast

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Twenty-four year old school  teacher KATHRYN (KAT) DELANEY enjoys a comfortable and nondescript life, until events begin to crash down around her, beginning with the murder of her acutely secretive and over-protective father. His death triggers an investigation, which raises questions as to who he really was, and who she is.

Kat is determined to find the answer to her true identity, but the answers find her before she has a chance. Kat is thrown into the violent and chilling world from which her father had protected her all these years, and now she must fight for her life.

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MY REVIEW

Kat’s father was a wonderful dad who loved and protected his daughter, but he was never clear about his past. After Kat’s father is killed, Kat is thrown into a mystery to find out what her father was hiding and who she really is.

This is a fast-paced read. The first part of the novel is a typical mystery, where someone is killed and an investigation into the death begins. Then things take a turn, and a wild adventure begins for Kat as she discovers more about her past. Kat is a young woman, working as a teacher, and living a normal life. She is a little spoiled by her father, but as the novel progresses she starts to take care of herself and become more independent.

The Dagger is an interesting mystery. Kat’s search into her past leads to a wild experience with a variety of characters, including a former boyfriend turned PI, a crazy madman, and a fanatical cult. Suspenseful and exciting.

I received a digital copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Books in the Kat Delaney series:

1. The Dagger

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The rules are simple.

But the game is not.

At eleven years old, Morgan Sheppard solved the murder of a teacher when everyone else believed it to be a suicide. The publicity surrounding the case laid the foundation for his reputation as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. He parlayed that fame into a gig as TV’s “resident detective,” solving the more typical tawdry daytime talk show mysteries like “Who is the father?” and “Is he cheating?”

Until, that is, Sheppard wakes up handcuffed to a bed in an unfamiliar hotel room. Around him, five strangers are slowly waking up, as well. Soon they discover a corpse in the bathtub and Sheppard is challenged to put his deductive skills to the test. One of the people in the room is the killer. He has three hours to solve the murder. If he doesn’t find the killer, they all will die.

An ingenious, page-turning debut, Chris McGeorge’s Guess Who matches the high-wire plotting of classic “locked room” mysteries into the unstoppable pacing of the modern-day thriller.

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MY REVIEW

A group of strangers awakens in a locked hotel room, and soon discovers a dead body in the room with them. To escape the room, they are tasked with identifying the killer, who is one of them.

The main character, Morgan Sheppard, hosts a detective show on television. He is the primary target of the madman who has kidnapped them and locked them in a room with a corpse. The kidnapper appears on the room’s TV to address the strangers, and tells Shappard that to prove he is a good detective, he needs to solve the mystery. Since the punishment of not solving the mystery in the allotted time is death, the others are, obviously, trying to identify the killer too. Lots of drama, distrust, and arguments.

Throughout Guess Who, flashbacks of Sheppard’s childhood appear. When he was young, Sheppard solved a mystery, and that case brought him a lot of attention and fame. Ever since then, he has struggled with desiring the attention that fame affords, but also battling with personal demons.

Guess Who is a locked room mystery that started off strong. I enjoy this type of mystery, and was curious how the story would end. This one does have some twists, though I felt the story was a little too long and drawn out. Really, the ending was over-explained, and, for me, that took something away from the story. A good read for fans of locked room mysteries. Dark and twisted.

Books by Chris McGeorge:

1. Guess Who
2. Now You See Me
3. Inside Out
4. Half-Past Tomorrow
5. A Murder at Balmoral

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Jon thought he had all the time in the world to respond to his wife’s text message: I miss you so much. I feel bad about how we left it. Love you. But as he’s waiting in the lobby of the L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland after an academic conference, still mulling over how to respond to his wife, he receives a string of horrifying push notifications. Washington, DC, has been hit with a nuclear bomb, then New York, then London, and finally Berlin. That’s all he knows before news outlets and social media goes black—and before the clouds on the horizon turn orange.

Two months later, there are twenty survivors holed up at the hotel, a place already tainted by its strange history of suicides and murders. Jon and the rest try to maintain some semblance of civilization. But when he goes up to the roof to investigate the hotel’s worsening water quality, he is shocked to discover the body of a young girl floating in one of the tanks, and is faced with the terrifying possibility that there might be a killer among the group.

As supplies dwindle and tensions rise, Jon becomes obsessed with discovering the truth behind the girl’s death. In this “brilliantly executed…chilling and extraordinary” post-apocalyptic mystery, “the questions Jameson poses—who will be with you at the end of the world, and what kind of person will you be?—are as haunting as the plot itself.” (Emily St. John Mandel, nationally bestselling author of Station Eleven).

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MY REVIEW

Jon is staying at a hotel in Switzerland when nuclear war breaks out. The hotel is in a remote enough location that the employees and guests of the hotel are safe from the bombs, but cut off from society. Some people from the hotel decide to leave and find their way home, but Jon and 20 or so others remain at the hotel. After a couple of months in the hotel, the water pressure starts to disappear. While investigating the cause, the body of a young girl is found. Jon takes it upon himself to find out what happened to the girl, and he becomes obsessed with identifying the killer. Meanwhile, supplies decrease and tensions between the hotel residents increase.

Jon is an American visiting Switzerland for an academic conference. The novel is told from his point of view using a diary/journal style. Jon and his wife have a troubled marriage, and he feels guilty for how he left things with her. Part of his behavior is a result of his guilt, and his need to make things right.

We never know much about the attacks, just that various cities in the United States and Europe have been bombed. After the attacks, communication (i.e., internet access) is mostly lost. The hotel has resources, so they have basics like food, water, and shelter. It would have been nice to know a little more about the attacks, but that is not the primary focus of the story. The relationships between the survivors is the focus, and is very realistic. The hotel residents are varied in their nationalities, backgrounds, beliefs, and personalities. This seems accurate, and creates a lot of conflict.

This novel is more of a character study, and not a lot of action takes place. Based on the book description, I was expecting more mystery than is delivered. Still, the characters and their interactions were believable and interesting.

Fantastic setting. Interesting characters. Slow paced. Good for fans of apocalyptic stories with a little mystery.

Fun fact: My family and I were vacationing in Hawaii when we received a notification about a ballistic missile threat, so the whole finding out about the end of the world in a notification on your phone is kind of realistic.

I heard about this book from fellow book blogger Amy Sullivan @ Novel Gossip. Thank you for recommending this book and sending me the Netgalley widget!