Tuesday 16 July 2024

Book ~ "The Off Season" (2024) Amber Cowie

From Goodreads ~ The Venatura Hotel desperately needs a facelift. Too bad renovations are murder on a marriage.

While recovering from a professional setback, documentary filmmaker Jane Duvall stays at a remote hotel during the off season with her new contractor husband, Dom, and his daughter, Sienna. Surrounded by an immense forest and the mighty Fraser River, Jane wants nothing more than to bond with her new family. But she’s unsettled by the cold quiet presence of the hotel’s owner, Peter, who is overseeing Dom’s renovations. 

When she starts asking questions, Dom grows distant and Sienna becomes belligerent. Undeterred, Jane uncovers secrets that make her question exactly who she married, including a series of strange disappearances at the hotel in previous seasons. When a rainstorm of epic proportions threatens to flood the banks of the river and claim the Venatura Hotel, Jane must solve these mysteries if she’s to survive the off season.

Jane is a filmmaker in British Columbia and reeling from the backlash of her latest documentary and a bad break-up. She heads to Spain on vacation where she meets and falls in love with Dom, who is also from British Columbia. They agree to get to know each other naturally and not Google each other. All she knows is that he's a widower, he's 13 years older than her and has a teenage daughter named Sienna who is an exchange student in France.

Less than six months later, they are married and they moving to the middle of nowhere in British Columbia to a hotel owned by his friend, Peter, that is closed for the winter and where Dom will finish renovations. Once there, she realizes that Dom expects her to be a "wife" and do all the cooking and cleaning, which she begrudgingly does. She has no idea how or when Melissa, Dom's late wife, passed away as he doesn't want to talk about it (he said he wasn't ready to talk about it). Sienna treats her like crap and does a couple despicable things and Dom chastises Jane for getting mad and reacting.

When Jane discovers one of the former workers at the hotel had disappeared and no one seems bothered about it, she sees a story and she and her partner start working on it. That's when she realizes there is more to it than just a missing man and starts to dig deeper.

Really? I found it hard to believe that Jane would be that dumb to marry a guy she chose to know nothing about and who was secretive about his past. Sienna was nasty and able to get away with it. I found none of the characters likable. It's written in third person perspective with the focus on Jane. I wasn't crazy about the writing style as I found it a bit draggy. The story had an interesting premise but didn't deliver for me. As a head's up, there is swearing.

No comments:

Post a Comment