The Christmas Holiday by Mikayla Davids
Genre: Psychological thriller
Read: 11th December 2022
Published: 2nd December 2022
★★★ 3.5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
The perfect vacation or the perfect murder...
It's Christmastime and thirty-two-year-old Alicia Silver is spending her first Christmas holiday with her handsome new husband Jack and his family in their remote lodge in the Irish mountains.
The Silver family are wealthy and beautiful, they seem to live a charmed existence and Alicia only hopes she can live up to their high expectations for her marriage.
The festivities are in full swing but Alicia quickly discovers that, behind their perfect image, the Silver family are hiding plenty of secrets...
The gorgeous husband
The jealous sister-in-law
The glamorous step-mother
The wealthy father-in-law
Before the vacation is over one of them will be dead.
But who would kill to protect their secret? And who will survive this Christmas holiday?
MY THOUGHTS:
I've not read this author before but the premise sounded interesting enough to check it out. I have to say I loved the setting - a snow-covered lodge in the wilds of the Wicklow Mountains, cut off from everyone and everything. Even the WiFi and mobile phone signal goes down. It was completely atmospheric! Of course, you just know that things are bound to go wrong. And do they ever?
The tension is charged from the beginning as the story opens with an unnamed person finding a body in the snow and the police closing in. But whose is the body and who is the person found standing over it? Stay tuned because this family holiday will reveal all before the book's end.
We meet Alicia who, having just married the man of her dreams after years of on/off casual acquaintance, is on her way from their home in London to the secluded family lodge in the Irish mountains for Christmas. She is excited at the prospect of getting to know Jack's family and hopefully making them her own. She is an only child to older parents who have since died within a year of each other and to make matters worse, her best friend also died shortly after. So when Jack whisked her away to Paris and proposed, Alicia finally realised her dreams had become reality and that Jack loved her as she loved him.
And so here they are, making the long journey to Angelsey in Wales where they will ferry across to Dublin and make the final trek to the lodge in the mountains. Alicia couldn't be happier. Jack is handsome, outgoing, charismatic and apparently very very wealthy...and he is now hers. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course Jack's family is nothing if not flawed but Alicia is going to use this holiday to make her mark with them and hope that they will love and accept her into their family. Again...what could possibly go wrong?
At the head of the Silver family is the tyrannical patriarch Patrick who along with his second wife Dawn, is further comprised of Jack's younger brother Ronan, his wife Yasmin and their baby daughter Lily, with the addition of Dawn's stepdaughter Zara and of course Nuala the dog. Now I feel I must add here that nothing happens to Nuala beyond being locked outdoors once. I am, of course, happy about that. Nothing must ever happen to the dog. Ever.
But beneath the surface there's a sense of malevolence and, along with all the secrets and lies, something sinister is bubbling. And someone is going to pay with their life before the book's end while another will pay in an altogether different way in this twisted tale of revenge.
So the scene is set, the players have all arrived. Let the games begin.
I have to say, I really didn't know what to expect with this thriller. I had never heard of the author and therefore was unfamiliar with her style. Pretty much all of the characters were unlikeable, except Nuala of course. You can always count on the dog to be the most endearing character of all. Patrick was on a complete power trip, Yasmin was a bitch with designs on the family fortune, Ronan was merely her puppet, Jack was a selfish prat, Alicia was a blind fool who spent most of the time blushing or making some mistake, Dawn was over the top in just about every way possibly and Zara was simply moody and made no secret of her dislike at being there. Lily was too young to make much of an impact, although when she kept making a beeline for the Christmas tree and smashing a precious bauble that left Dawn in tears had me shaking my head. Why place such precious items within a child's reach?
There were of course a few flaws within the plot that didn't gel with the rest of the story. I mean, Alicia is pretty much allergic to caffeine, right? That is, she can't have any caffeine lest she take to her bed with severe migraines. So then why, when Yasmin serves up a Tiramisu for dessert (on purpose I felt), does Alicia gush over how much she loved the said dessert despite knowing and listing it's main ingredient as coffee? Another flaw is when she decides, quite randomly, to whip up her special red velvet cupcakes that everyone simply adored. Why she felt she had to is quite beyond me as if I was visiting with barely-known in-laws I certainly wouldn't be taking over their kitchen for whatever reason. It just felt like it was randomly inserted. And then it appears she has a secret ingredient - almond flour. But no one had alerted her to a nut allergy, even though Yasmin had looked over the ingredients earlier citing they were fine, so of course Alicia was deemed negligent for not checking. But added to that, the almond flour came from Dawn's own kitchen and having a nut allergy why would she even stock it?
Aside from all that, THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY is a tension-filled thriller that is something of a slow burn to begin with that gradually builds and the whole event is then over and done with in a matter of chapters. It seemed that the focus was on the dysfunctional family dynamics and secret jealousies that the body found in the snow in the beginning doesn't even make it into the storyline until nearer the end, with the lack of investigation undertaken in the following chapters until the final twist at the end. And what a twist it was! For that alone, my rating of this read has gone a star, for on the whole the rest of the book was fairly average at 3 stars but I've added a fourth for that brilliant ending that not even I saw coming!
Overall, THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY is perfect for fans of slow burn thrillers who relish the gradual build of tension with the final unravelling of twists a dizzying prospect that leaves you with your head between your knees until the feeling passes. An interesting read with the best part being the atmospheric setting.
I would like to thank #MikaylaDavids and #ZoolooTours for an ARC of #TheChristmasHoliday in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
But I will tell you I've lived and breathed fictional worlds all my life. I've been the child who spent hours in the library, the teenager who stayed up turning pages way into the night, the editor who poured every working hour into helping authors achieve their dreams of being published. Now I'm the secret writer.
I write psychological thrillers about family dramas, complicated relationships and ordinary moments that can suddenly turn into nightmares.
Social media links:
thank you so much for taking part in the tour and for sharing your review x
ReplyDelete