The Precipice is a legendary, family-owned hotel on the rocky coast of Maine. With the recent passing of their father, the Bishop sisters—Iris, Vicki, and Faith—have come for the weekend to claim it. But with a hurricane looming and each of the Bishop sisters harboring dangerous secrets, there’s murder in the air—and not everyone who checks into the Precipice will be checking out.
Each sister wants what is rightfully hers, and in the mix is the Precipe’s nineteen-year-old chambermaid Charley Kelley: smart, resilient, older than her years, and in desperate straits.
The arrival of the Bishop sisters could spell disaster for Charley. Will they close the hotel? Fire her? Discover her habit of pilfering from guests? Or even worse, learn that she’s using a guest room to hide a woman on the run.
With razor-sharp wit, heart, thrills, and twists, Jamie Day delivers a unique brand of SUMMERTIME SUSPENSE.
I saw this ARC ready to be picked up on Netgalley and figured, why not? It sounds right up my alley. And overall, I’d say that it was, and it does kind of fit into that “summertime suspense” that is advertised above. Thanks to them for providing this in exchange for an honest review.
One Big Happy Family is an aptly named book, in two ways. It speaks of two families: the Bishops, who have just inherited the Precipice Hotel after the tragic demise of their father. It also speaks of the “family” that now finds themselves trapped at The Precipice after the storm, Larry, hits. In a typical closed-room fashion, strange things start happening, including deaths. How can these deaths be explained, and who will be next on the killer’s list?
Overall the characters were fairly good. They were each mysterious and a bit suspicious, the perfect combination for a mystery thriller, of course. I definitely had all of them in mind, and I was able to keep track of the various characters pretty well. The characters all had relationship issues between them, but it was hard to say what the secrets they were all harbouring were. There was good suspense generated just by virtue of these characters, but I did find the character of Oliver a little bit unrealistic, and just kind of weird. The extra characters that arrived at the Precipice hotel in addition to the main players I felt was also not integrated fully well. It was a cool set-up to have the suspense of a stowaway, but as the story progressed, it didn’t fully make sense to me why she was there—it felt like she was just planted there for dramatic effect, which I suppose she was.
That being said though, I did enjoy the story in terms of the suspense. There were a lot of suspenseful moments, and the author chose the timing of reveals and new information pretty well. I enjoyed the pacing for the most part so I did read through it pretty quickly. My only concern here is some of the slightly less plausible storylines that I had to push through. Most things were explained eventually so there wasn’t as much “supernatural” events going on as was kind of suggested, but the focus on such events to explain the mystery didn’t work for me. However, commentary aside, I felt that the story was well paced and the suspense was generally quite good.
The climax of the story was decent, albeit a bit predictable by the time we got close. There were good twists and turns on the way, and it was still an exciting story, but I felt like I definitely lost some of the momentum right at the climax, even though I wouldn’t say it was badly written. Maybe it’s my experience with these kinds of books, but I didn’t feel too surprised by the big reveal, which really tampered the suspense for me. The denouement was good though, and the tying up of all the loose ends that were laid out were satisfactorily done, so that I felt like I wasn’t wondering about much more. There were a lot of what I would call “coincidental” events in this book though, which I felt made it even more tenuous for plausibility.
Overall I enjoyed reading the book, and it definitely had moments where it shone and I felt that it was a strong contender for being a 4 Drink Me Potions book. However, the interspersed portions where I wasn’t fully bought on really did take away from it for me, so I will have to land on the 3.5. While the story might have been slightly over-manufactured, I still mostly enjoyed the journey and trying to figure out the “solution” to the riddle(s) anyway, so points for the book there. This may be the book for you if you enjoy just reading in the moment suspense, and don’t worry too much about plausibility.
Down the Rabbit Hole 