Brutal. I had a headache trying to read this. The story is jumpy and erratic. The writing style is a NIGHTMARE. Murder mystery style books are what I adore and this sounded so promising but it did not make for an enjoyable read in any way. I can't believe anyone thought inserting footnotes into every paragraph was a good idea.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I did enjoy this book but the footnotes don’t work on an ereader and it really detracts from the enjoyment of the story.

Wow, I had no idea what I was expecting before I started this, and I was definitely pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed this book and I definitely now I have a feel for this author's rather different writing style, and the characters, am keen to read the next book in the series.

For the writing style is very chatty, breaks the 4th wall often, even going behind the scenes of how a book is constructed, and there are more footnotes than I have ever seen in a fiction book before. In fact due to the footnotes I think this may be a book best read in paperback.

Eleanor Dash is a best selling author and is doing a real life 10th Anniversary tour of the Amalfi Coast for her first book, which was largely based on a previous holiday to the coast and featured Connor who was the only name she didn't change and is a real life person.

A real life person who is also on this tour and is convinced someone is trying to kill him. Also with them are Eleanor's other ex boyfriend, Connor's ex-wife, an author who might be ripping of Eleanor's plots, someone from the same publisher, and a few others, who conveniently may also have axes to grind with Connor. Oh and there are a group of big fans touring alongside them which just happens to include Eleanor's stalker too!

So this is part absolutely escapist travel fiction, giving us a look at some highlights of the Amalfi coast, we get the past history between Eleanor and Connor and Oliver. We are treated to a real life murder mystery playing out, with a rather incompetent police detective involved. And a whole lot more.

The more I read of this, the more I was enjoying it, I was curious to find out who the murder was, and I think I had figured some bits out slightly ahead of the reveal but without key guesses of motive!

This is a light hearted, sun filled cosy mystery that is perfect for the upcoming hopefully hotter days, where you just want to escape into a book and be entertained!

Thank you to MacMillan and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

I received an ebook ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a very middling book for me but it did begin to pick up towards the end there.

First of all, let's address the elephant in the room. The footnotes. From reading the other reviews they have been very divisive but I actually didn't mind them! They didn't massively contribute to my enjoyment of the book but I liked the meta-ness of some of them and honestly, they aren't integral to the story so they're easy enough to ignore if you really can't deal with them.

I did, however, HATE the main character. She was just so irritating and whiny and I do not understand why anyone puts up with her (her sister and love interest especially). Anything I enjoyed about this book I enjoyed in spite of the main character not because of.

There was also an awful lot of time in this book where nothing was happening. The actual murder doesn't occur until around the 60% mark so that means that over half of the book is spent establishing characters and relationships and backstories and locations and having hijinks and near misses that are inconsequential. So while things did pick up and get fairly fast-paced after the murder it was a bit of a struggle to get there and I can definitely see some people being unwilling to stick it out for that long.

Overall though, after the 60% mark when the 'murder mystery' really starts I did find myself invested and I got through the back-half a lot quicker and was pretty satisfied with the ultimate resolution. So whilst I didn't love this book, I would be interested enough to give the next book in the series a chance.

Every time I go on vacation someone dies by Catherine Mack is the debut book by the author. Introducing bestselling author Eleanor Dash on her world book tour, that turns into its own murder mystery tour.. Ten days, eight suspects, six cities, five authors, three bodies, who is responsible and will Eleanor find out before the next person is killed.
An entertaining storyline and the start of a whole new series of books.
Recommend

Every Time I Go On Vacation by Catherine Mack is a delightfully entertaining and humorous mystery novel, the first in The Vacation Mysteries series, which I both read and listened to on audio, just over 9 hours and 30 minutes long, marvellously narrated by Elizabeth Evans, who juggles the wide cast of different characters, the drama, and foot notes with aplomb, keeping me joyously engaged from beginning to end. There are beautiful rich and vivid descriptions of the Italian locations and the coast, along with insights into Italian culture. The reader gets deeply immersed in the narrative, what with the author using the handy device of having well known, best selling and established author, Eleanor Dash, speaking directly to the reader in the present tense.

The dysfunctional and chaotic Eleanor is on a 10 day book tour organised by her publisher on the Amalfi coast with quite the entourage that includes her sister, Harper, other authors, fans and stalker, Oliver, and the dislikeable con man Connor Smith, ex-lover and blackmailer. He is certainly no hero, but he has featured in her mystery series, and she is desperately trying to kill him off in a literary sense, but this proves not to be so easy! Her goal meets the muddying and mystifying waters of the real life harsh reality of someone actually trying to kill Connor, and is Eleanor herself facing dangers too? Eleanor turns sleuth in this mystery of twists and turns, with its references to Agatha Christie and Goodreads, and a vibrantly colourful large collection of suspects to look into.

Mack writes a intricate and well plotted murder mystery, with its fabulous locations, and an appealing protagonist in Eleanor Dash with her own brand of snark and wit, embarking on a career as sleuth. This has me greatly anticipating the next in the series! I can recommend this to readers of crime and mysteries, particularly those looking for a break from the intense and heavy darkness of the genre. I would urge readers to consider listening to the audio as the narrator is simply wonderful. Many thanks to the publisher for the ALC and the ARC.

The story itself is interesting, and had great potential, but was let down by horrific editing. The author uses footnotes, which I’m normally a fan of, but sadly the author peppers them in so liberally that half of the book is in the footnotes. To make matters worse, the footnotes aren’t clickable to see them, or even situated under where they’re referenced. Instead they’re several pages on, leaving the reader having to try to remember to what the footnote is referring. For this reason I didn’t finish this book as it was altogether too much hard work, though the parts I read were really good. I hope the author gets a new editor before the book is released as I think it could be a good book if the digital edition works properly

This was a soft thriller based in Italy which was described beautifully. (Made me want to visit!)
The plot was quite fun, nice bit of escapism but I must admit I wasn’t 100% sold on the writing style with all the footnotes, this may be because it was an e book? It was just quite hard to follow.
Thank you to netgalley for sending.

I loved this book - it was fun, a really good read, and the footnotes were brilliant.
Really looking forward to more in this series, plus the TV series when it's out - should be brilliant.

This was a page turner that had me hooked from the start and unsure of who would end up a victim and who was the culprit. I don’t usually read mystery & thrillers as they can get really dark, but Catherine Macks writing style keeps things light and flowing but with the appropriate amounts of depth for the genre. The Italian summer setting was a beautiful backdrop to the story, and I loved that the characters were all thrown together for an elaborate book tour and sight seeing trip in one. The narration style is quirky with all the footnotes that set it us perfectly to be adapted for film. If you enjoy Agatha Christie novels or enjoyed Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery then you’ll enjoy this book too. I look forward to reading book 2!

My thanks to Netgalley for the DRC of this book, all opinions are my own.

This one veers between a 2.5 and 3.5, so I'm averaging out. And, in the interests of transparency, let it be known that I picked this book hastily, thinking it was by another author, Bella Mackie (whose homage to Kind Hearts and Coronets was a brilliant updating of said black-and-white movie, and a solid 4. Go read it.).
I was about 50 pages in (easy to do, trust me) before I realised my mistake, but by then the murder attempts had started, so I decided to hang on in there.
This is definitely a beach read, indeed, I'd say you could quite comfortably have more than your usual allocation of poolside drinks and still manage to get the gist of things. The prose is absolutely awful - and considering the protagonist is an author of cosy crime novels, this is ironic - and nowhere more so than when she tries to be "literary". The characters are two-dimensional, but that's okay, because they're mostly pretty horrible (including the protagonist); there are quite a few plot holes that are dressed up as red herrings, but are never sufficiently explained; and, oh, oh, oh - the footnotes! Don't get me wrong, I love me some good footnotes, used correctly, but the author obviously missed that part of English class. There are far too many, and not only are the majority of them not very funny, but the author takes the fourth wall, breaks it down to rubble, carts it away to the dump, and then sets fire to it i.e unnecessary, often irritating, and eventually (there are nearly 300 of them) taking up about 50 pages of the book.
On the plus side, the plot tears along at an addictive pace (I'll admit, I read on in the hopes that they would ALL be killed), twisting like the Amalfi coast itself, and the prose is so light that you could absolutely read it half sozzled, so I'm sure this will be a big summer success - although, with so many current cultural references, I'm also sure it won't make it past next summer.
I won't be looking out any past books by this author, I prefer something a bit meatier for my hols, but we live and learn, and this was vaguely amusing in spots (if a bit heavy-handed), so time not entirely wasted.

Bright, breezy and fun, with a snarky narrator, an engaging mystery, colourful characters, and delightful locations, this is an entertaining read you'll want to share with friends. Think Janet Evanovich (Stephanie Plum) meets Benjamin Stevenson (Everyone in my family has killed someone).

I really enjoyed this book, though at times the footnotes were a bit overwhelming! It was a fun beach read of a book, great cast of characters, nice light read.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan for the ARC copy of this book prior to its release on the 2nd May!

Oh my goodness this book was such a bit of me! Starting off with the book being set in Italy, which was exactly what I needed as we're coming into Spring and I am yearning for warmer weather so badly. This book would be ideal to be reading in the Summer when you're on holiday, sipping a beverage (alcoholic or non). It just gives warm Summer vibes in the best way.

The plot of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies was very cleverly written by Catherine Mack in my opinion. Reading through how the characters got themselves out of extremely difficult situations was really intelligently done. I couldn't see or predict how it was going to happen, but Catherine ended up doing it in such an intellectual way that I didn't see coming at all, but it made complete sense and wasn't illogical or far fetched at all. I loved the surprise of it! I could never see what was coming (unless the narrator made you aware of how something was going to happen before it did happen, to further the plot).

I really enjoy seeing writers push the boundaries of the structure of novels and play about with new and interesting formats, and this is definitely what Catherine Mack does in this book! She uses footnotes which at first I was a bit unsure of, as it felt a bit annoying for obvious things to be put in the footnotes (e.g. "this is foreshadowing, by the way"), but as I got further into the book I love that it helped me to understand the narrators personality, and really felt like she was talking to me directly, not to me as a part of the audience of the book. And I actually found by the end of it that the footnotes helped me to enjoy the book on a different level, and I feel if they weren't there, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the story as much or felt so connected to the narrator and protagonist.

One thing to be wary of is that there is a lot of short sentences which I don't really experience in things I read generally, so I was drawn towards the fact that sentences were really short and it was super obvious/stand out to me. But I did find it helped the pacing of a book and I like a fast-paced book that keeps me hooked, and this definitely was just that! I was so hooked and couldn't put it down once we got into the nitty gritty of the story and all the drama was happening.

I enjoyed this quirky story of an author on a trip with authors. With some humour and some twists and turns which I wasn’t expecting. I found this book very enjoyable and different. Well worth a read.

Not sure what to make of this one. On one hand it's a fairly quick read - though that might be in part because I was skipping and speed reading some of it - and on the other hand it's a bit of a mess. The constant footnotes are irritating - they may be fine (and ignorable) in the paperback version but on Kindle they are tumbled in with the rest of the text, making it difficult to work out what's what. I didn't feel I needed the footnotes anyway but I suppose they are part of the 'quirky' narrative.

I found the heroine annoying to a certain extent - she blames herself for things that aren't her fault (a relationship with a married man who forgot to mention he had a wife) but carries on associating with him. She acts in a self-deprecating manner but at the same time, seems full of herself.

I pretty much guessed the ending - which is easily done if you work on the principle that the least likely person 'dunnit'. However, there are a few least likelys, so it's not as straightforward as it might be.

I hate to be negative as I know how much work goes into writing a book and I'm sure some readers will enjoy this. It's fun in its way, just not for me, really.

Reading the premise, I knew this was a book I'd dive headlong into and I certainly did!

I will say this, I am a sucker for footnotes. If you have footnotes and use them well (like this does) I am going to be there reading that thing til the very last page, no exception. The narrative voice in this book is so good and made me want to keep reading - I also really appreciate the characters and there were moments I was like, yeah I get it. I often find characters tend to be unrelateable, here not the case.

This book also has such a great pace, we do not hang around to find out what's going on and we are taken straight into the story that makes this book when you begin difficult to put down. I finished this book not long ago and with that ending, how am I meant to sit here and wait for the next one? I can't wait for more from this series for sure.

Funny, gripping and relateable for a murder mystery (they don't happen in real life to me, at least) I would definitely recommend this for every vacation you're planning to take this year, it's the perfect beach read.

(thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the ARC for review!)

An engaging cosy crime novel set on the Italian Amalfi Coast, author Eleanor Dash contemplates killing off her ex-boyfriend—both in her books and possibly in real life. I’m not sure about the footnotes though … that said, it was an easy read - perhaps with a sequel - onwards and upwards, as they say,

Author of a series of cosy crime novels, Eleanor Dash is fed up of her morally bankrupt ex who is blackmailing her. He’s the co-star of her series and the fans and her publishers love him. So how will they take it if Eleanor kills him? Not literally you understand, just in book form. But then life starts imitating art. With her notebook full of possible sticky endings as evidence is Eleanor going down for a crime she literally plotted?
Just when you think you’ve read every take on a cosy crime novel this book comes along. This book is an absolute joy! Yes, I may have guessed whodunnit, but it didn’t detract from a brilliantly cleverly written tale and the author did break the fourth wall and encourage us to solve the mystery? Setting the book on the Italian Amalfi Coast with armchair sightseeing and menu perusal was a delicious added bonus. I defy you not to want to head to the travel agents to book yourself a trip. In the meantime I’m off to MeanReads to post my review - IYKYK.

Thanks to publishers and #NetGalley for an #ARC of #EveryTimeIGoOnVacationSomeoneDies.
I give this book 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.
I struggled with the book style initially, it is in the style of the author talking directly to the reader, asking questions etc. I quickly adapted, and I did enjoy the writing style by the end. However I found the footnotes a bit OTT. As this was an ARC the formatting was hard to follow regarding the footnotes, in the fully published book it may be different.
I would put it under the 'cozy mystery' umbrella, and it was an enjoyable one. I would probably look into Book 2 in the series when it is released. I don't think I would recommend, as the writing style could annoy some people.