Book Review: The Holiday

A reunion of four friends and their families after five years goes awry and turns deadly in T. M. Logan's The Holiday (also published as The Vacation). It's a setting that's familiar, one where everybody has secrets to hide and no one is entirely truthful, where unraveling those knots can destroy years of good relationships in a blink, and where someone is prepared to kill to keep them hidden. But for Kate, a crime analyst with the Met, the trouble in paradise comes early within hours of arrival when she finds messages that suggest her husband Sean has been having an affair with one of her three friends at the gathering. Thus what starts as a summer idyll at a luxurious private villa in the south of France slowly but steadily takes a darker turn, as Kate increasingly preoccupies with finding out her husband's paramour, little realising that the source of the distress may have been brewing somewhere else altogether. Logan nimbly alternates perspectives and timelines throughout the narrative, even if it loses whizz in a rushed, implausible climax (not to mention something that could have been resolved in a matter of hours). Come for the fast and furious twists, stay for its exploration of female bonding, motherhood, and mental health.