Every Time I Go on Vacation Someone Dies, Catherine Mack

To be honest - read the blurb on this and nearly made it a hard pass. But I do love Only Murders in the Building, so I am relieved I paid no attention to my initial reservations, started reading and a few chapters in, was highly amused and very engaged.

On one hand it's all a bit silly - Eleanor Dash is a breathless, disorganised, needy writer who finds herself on a book tour surrounded by a busload of groupies (known as the BookFace ladies), a number of other authors somewhere on the unpleasant to unmemorable scale, an ex-flame, an ex-boyfriend (two different men), a stalker, assorted other people and her sister Harper Dash. Harper is also Eleanor's long suffering personal assistant, a woman who is in desperate want of a new career path. All of them are being shepherded around the place by a tour guide who seems to be a dab hand at reading from Wikipedia pages.

The central thing with Eleanor is that her ex-boyfriend wound up as the major character in her Vacation Mysteries series, claimed a huge part of the royalties, having done not a lot else except annoy her since then. It's a long story, the book explains it very well, and her ex-boyfriend is an annoyance that Dash could well do without. So much so that she's already planning the death of Connor Smith, and the entire series if that's what it takes to be rid of him. With the stress on a literary death that is. According to Smith, however, somebody is taking a somewhat more physical approach.

If it sounds complicated it kind of is, but then again it's not. The whole thing rocks along at a lunatic pace, with comic asides, a bit of steamy rekindling of romance (not between Connor and Eleanor despite what he thinks he's capable of), some dodging and weaving around manic fans and glorious food / hotels. Oh and there's three bodies by the end of it all. All the while touring six cities which are wonderfully evoked on the page. When there's room, what with the dead bodies, the food, the weird conversations, the confusion, the infights, and the personality clashes that should have been declared a fire hazard. 

Needless to say this is comedy, and it works, in that it's subtle when it's not in your face, it's hilarious when it's not being subversive and it's very centred around a woman who is part diva / part victim. The resolution, when it arrives, makes perfect sense, and to be honest, probably could have been deduced if you're into that sort of thing. But if you're a voyage beats the destination reader, there is so much here to keep you laughing, guessing, laughing a bit more, smiling, hungry, wondering about what women see in some men, or what some men see in some daft as a brush women, or whether a tour to Italy always has to come with a side serving of death and destruction, EVERY TIME I GO ON VACATION, SOMEONE DIES was just the thing.