Meet Maggie Chase and Ethan
She’s the new Queen of the Cozy Mystery.
He’s Mr. Big-time Thriller Guy.
She hates his guts.
He thinks her name is Marcie (no matter how many times she’s told him otherwise.)
But when they both accept a cryptic invitation to attend a Christmas house party at the English estate of a reclusive fan, neither is expecting their host to be the most powerful author in the Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death herself.
That night, the weather turns, and the next morning Eleanor is gone.
She vanished from a locked room, and Maggie has to Is Eleanor in danger? Or is it all some kind of test? Is Ethan the competition? Or is he the only person in that snowbound mansion she can trust?
As the snow gets deeper and the stakes get higher, every clue will bring Maggie and Ethan closer to the truth—and each other. Because, this Christmas, these two rivals are going to have to become allies (and maybe more) if they have any hope of saving Eleanor.
Assuming they don’t kill each other first.
Comment: Several of my friends on GoodReads have enjoyed this book, released last year. I thought the idea of it was great so I skipped reading reviews and "saved it" to read this year, especially for the Christmas period. Well, it turns out it didn't impress me much...
Maggie and Ethan are both authors with the same publisher and they don't seem to get along. They are invited to the house of Eleanor Ashley, a very successful crime novelist, someone they both look up to, for different reasons. It's not clear why they are there but Eleanor is not getting younger so perhaps she wants to meet them and see if one could follow on her footsteps? However, one day after they arrive, after several little adventures which would be enough to confuse them, Eleanor disappears, and there is an attempt at another guest's life. Maggie and Ethan decide to investigate, just like the characters in their books, but there's also the small detail of how much they are into each other. With all this close proximity, is there room for more than animosity between them?
On paper, this really felt like catnip to me. Enemies to lovers, a slight whodunit and characters with issues to deal with on the path to happiness should be the perfect recipe for a perfect read, but I didn't enjoy this one as much as I imagined and the main reason was that it seemed too many things were in need of attention, so I didn't pay enough to any of them.
Maggie and Ethan are made to look enemies, and from Maggie's POV we get clues on why this happened, and why she feels lonely and rather bitter after her divorce, so having Ethan nearby, knowing his opinion of her, well, the assumption of it of course, only makes it worse. I kind of like Maggie, and I understand her personality and her attitude towards life, but to be fair, I never got a good impression of her, she didn't feel as fleshed out as I wanted and I think my lack of empathy with her made liking her more difficult.
Ethan is even more mysterious, certainly we learn why as the story develops, but, again, I didn't feel any particular connection with him, not even during the passages we have with his POV. I got it that his way of dealing with things is also a mechanism of defense, and I felt compassion when he shares his disappointment that Maggie didn't feel the same as he did when they met, and why their current animosity feels unfair to him, but he was definitely hard to read and think of in a broader sense.
The romance part of the story wasn't that bad, though, and I liked the banter, I liked the scenes where they share things and we get to feel the change in their perception of one another. I think that, if this book had aimed to be a romance novel on its own, I might have enjoyed it better, because the author would have certainly added other type of scenes, more character development, the usual tactics to make the reader care for these characters. I mean, many readers did, but to me the mix with the crime investigation just felt like too much was going on and not enough had a pay off.
The mystery is related to the disappearance of Eleanor Ashley, the person who invited them to a Christmas house party. The setup was already a bit far fetched because why only these two? The other guests were Eleanor's family, if it had been other people this might have felt less awkward, but having two strangers with the family so that they could supposedly be part of this concocted plan to play a game Eleanor planned? If this had been just a mystery, fine, I could ship this, but the whole thing started to feel confusing and a little boring, to be honest.
The mystery development had plenty of characters to plan doubts on what was happening. However, this was done using the usual cliches of the genre, and then having scenes where we would focus on the main couple and their romance, felt like too much at the same time. I think the author mixed up too many elements, perhaps to make them easy to identify by readers but to me this felt convoluted. Plus, I don't think leaving the mystery resolution kind of vague works. I wanted a more obvious finale and explanations and this didn't happen in a way I'd say is satisfying.
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