My Killer Vacation | Book Review

Kris and I were strolling through Chapters recently when I came across the “Spicy Booktok” table. That’s where I found “My Killer Vacation,” by Tessa Bailey. Before this, I had never read anything by Tessa Bailey before, but I’ve heard about her through none other than booktok, so I decided to give it a try.

I was looking for something light and fun to read, and this book did check a couple of those boxes. I did have a lot of moments where I felt “meh” about the book, which I’ll discuss below.

Plot

My Killer Vacation is about second grade private school teacher teacher Taylor Bassey. She’s on a vacation in Cape Cod with her brother Jude, when they discover a corpse in the laundry room of their beach house rental. Rough around the edges bounty hunter Myles Sumner has been called in as a favour to investigate the murder, and Tessa and Jude get moved into the beach house across the street to salvage their vacation.

Tessa is a true crime podcast fan and can’t help but want to try and solve the crime. While sneaking back onto the crime scene, she bumps into Myles, and much to his annoyance, together they work to solve the murder.

Thoughts (major spoilers ahead)

My first impression of Myles was that his character was not what I would consider attractive. I think due to this, I had a hard time getting into the spiciness of the novel. One of the first impressions we have of Myles is him being this moody antacid popping stereotypical bounty hunter. Literally, the amount of times she mentions that hes popping an antacid made me wonder if he had some undiagnosed medical issue. We get it, he’s got a stressful job. The way he talked was also annoying to me. He called her “sweetheart” a lot from the beginning, which felt icky and condescending.

Many of the moments between them felt unbelievable, and felt very underwritten. Like how they literally JUST met and immediately start thinking / talking about some very spicy things. A week later, he’s following her back to Connecticut to move in with her. Obviously the novel is meant to be a fun, light, spicy read, so it’s not supposed to be realistic, but I found it hard to connect to the characters.

The murder mystery aspect of the novel is greatly overshadowed by whatever Myles and Taylor have going on. The majority of the novel is about them either thinking about being with each other, or actually being with each other. I think the spicyness of the novel would have worked better if the murder mystery plotline was a bit more in depth.

I did like the setting of the novel, but felt the author could have done a better job describing the scenery. This was my first time reading a Tessa Bailey novel, and when reading reviews on this book (after I read it), I saw a lot of people say that this isn’t her usual quality, and that it’s the one Tessa Bailey book they didn’t like. I would be willing to try more of her books after this, but this one didn’t do it for me.

Overall, I would reccommend it if you’re looking for a light spicy read with little substance- just something you can get through quickly. I think there are better books out there that check those boxes though.

Rating 2/5

Spicy rating 4/5