“The Off Season” by Amber Cowie follows Jane, a documentary filmmaker, who makes the quick decision to marry a man she hardly knows. Jane, along with her new husband, Dom, and her newly acquired stepdaughter, Sienna, become off-season caretakers for a secluded hotel in British Columbia. Will she be able to bond with her new family at the hotel while a storm rages outside? What secrets are this hotel and her new family hiding?
I really enjoyed this atmospheric, twisty thriller novel full of secrets. It was very much a domestic thriller, full of family drama. What do you expect when a woman falls in love and marries a man with a teenage daughter too quickly? Plenty of drama. The setting reigned supreme, with our main characters being in a secluded hotel cut off from other people and resources during the off-season, along with environmental factors such as poor weather. These are two of my favorite elements in a good thriller.
Let’s talk about the characters real quick. They are all unreliable, from Jane to Sienna to all the smaller, less-noticed characters. You don’t know whom to believe and whom to trust. This influx of unreliable characters is guaranteed to make you think a lot about who is hiding what. Who is innocent, and who is guilty? You’ll have to read the book to figure it all out. And trust me, it’s thought-provoking; I personally was never able to predict the ending.
In my opinion, this book could have been better if the descriptors were simpler and the dialogue had a more natural flow. Some of the conversations were impractical and unnatural. Overall, this is a solid and entertaining thriller that I recommend to domestic suspense lovers.
Thank you Tandem Collective for the gifted copy for review purposes. All opinions expressed here are mine alone.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5
Page Turning Thrills 