My Killer Vacation Killed my Vacation: A Review

My Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Genre: Romance

Goodreads

An all-new, spicy murder mystery from Tessa Bailey, New York Times bestselling author of It Happened One Summer…

It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation in sweet, sunny Cape Cod—just me and my beloved brother—but discovering a corpse in our rental house really throws a wrench into our tanning schedule. Now a rude, crude bounty hunter has arrived on the back of his motorcycle to catch the killer and refuses to believe I can be helpful, despite countless hours of true crime podcast listening. Not to mention a fulfilling teaching career of wrangling second graders.

A brash bounty hunter and an energetic elementary schoolteacher: the murder-solving team no one asked for, but thanks to these pesky attempts on my life, we’re stuck together, come hell or high tide.

I’m just here to do a job, not babysit an amateur sleuth. Although…it is becoming less and less of a hardship to have her around. Sure, she’s stubborn, distracting and can’t stay out of harm’s way. She’s also brave and beautiful and reminds me of the home I left behind three years ago. In other words, the painful hunger and protectiveness she is waking up in me is a threat to my peace of mind. Before I sink any deeper into this dangerous attraction, I need to solve this murder and get back on the road. But will fate take her from me before I realize the road has been leading to her all along?

My Killer Vacation was one of the most hyped new release romances this summer. I personally don’t really enjoy straight up romance without something else going on, and so the idea of a romance MURDER MYSTERY was really hitting for me, unfortunately, this book left a lot to be desired.

I’ll start with the pros, because there aren’t many of them, but I did actually like the main character, Taylor, which is quite weird for a romance. I feel like she actually had a distinguishable personality and I didn’t hate being stuck inside her head, the same can unfortunately not be said for Myles’ pov, which takes us onto the cons.

I think my main issue with this book was just how insta-lovey it was. Literally the second Myles sees Taylor his brain goes ‘pretty woman man like’ and he literally never shuts up about how attractive she is and it is literally SO ANNOYING. There was no effort to build any kind of proper romance at all and it was literally based entirely off of physical attraction which was so unfortunate because I couldn’t bring myself to care about such a baseless romance.

Another issue that I had was with the murder mystery element of this book, I feel like it was one of the main selling points of the book and yet it just was so badly put together, and the actual direction and conclusion of the ‘mystery’ made no sense at all. I understand that the book is primarily a romance but if that was the case, I think a very corny cozy mystery vibe would have been better.

My final general critique is that considering this book was supposed to have the vacation vibe, I think more effort should have been put into actually creating a holiday atmosphere beyond just saying that there were nautical decorations in the holiday rental.

Characters

You may have picked up that my main issue with the book is centred around character issues. Thankfully, there were literally only two and a half characters that were given the time of day, so getting through them should be easy.

As I mentioned before, I actually quite liked our main character, Taylor, my only issue was Tessa Bailey’s attempt to give her this spiritual enlightenment. Essentially, Taylor mentions a lot that she has never been brave, and so she bangs and on about being braver and having this big awakening. This kind of just felt really forced to me, we are never actually shown anything, just told again and again by Taylor, it seemed like there was just this desperation to try and explain why it was that Taylor cared about the murder just so she could insert herself into it.

My main issue with the book was Myles: when I tell you I hated this man so much. He really really wanted everyone to know that he was a man with a capital M, that he uses a 7-in-1 hair and body wash, that he bathes in beer, that he just leaks manly essence everywhere he goes. It was all just so forced and overdone, it wasn’t at all natural to read and it just got on my nerves. As mentioned earlier, the whole relationship with this old ass man having a crush on a younger woman was based on the fact that he fancied her looks, he literally steals her underwear from her suitcase the first time they see each other and he is CRAZY possessive and forces himself on Taylor at every given chance.

Final thoughts…

Overall I was super disappointed by this book, it seemed to set itself out from other romances by having a little more substance to it, and then did not deliver on this at all.

That is all for this review! Let me know if you have read My Killer Vacation and what you thought of it, and please let me know if you have any holiday romance recommendations that do a little better than this, they would be very much appreciated.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and I will speak to you all next week!