Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
This was really bad. I don’t even know what to say. I think the ending was laughably bad. The parts in between weren’t great and the character development was non-existent. Day has done dual POV’s before and made it work, and this one just felt lackluster because Jade’s character was there for twist purposes honestly. And I felt like Holly was non-existent though she was the other POV character and in my opinion, the main one that should have been focused on throughout this book with Jade, if she must exist, just popping in and not wrecking the flow of the book. And I just think that Day has done better with her thrillers, so it’s odd this one just missed the mark entirely in my opinion. I gave her last one, The Lake Escape, 4 stars.
Beach Thriller follows Holly Sinclair, as she returns to her family’s beach home that she has not returned to since she was 18 after her sister’s death. Holly’s career as an author is not going as well as she would like, and having few funds, she returns home so she can at least avoid having to deal with paying for an apartment. While home, Holly can’t stop thinking about her sister and whether someone was responsible for her death all those years ago like she thought which could have ties to the most powerful family in town. She ends up befriending a runaway named Jade who is living in her attic. Jade is fascinated by Holly’s life and what happened to her sister and comes across a thriller that Holly wrote years earlier. She decides she’s going to take advantage of a job opportunity to do some investigating of her own. What neither know is that someone is watching their every move who doesn’t want Holly to figure out what happened to her sister.
Outside of Holly and Jade’s POV’s Day also includes the “Watcher” POV in this one and then we jump back to Holly’s thriller or memories, I honestly gave up trying to figure that one out about the summer that everything changed for her and her sister died. All of that together was just too much and the book never hangs together well. It just messed up the flow after a while and it didn’t help the thriller/memories were in a different font in my Kindle. Since this is an ARC, maybe that changes for full publication. I always note when authors do this since it ends up messing up my reading experience to have my eyes shifting back and forth like that. I think it honestly ever works in hardcover or paperbacks for me.
I can’t say much about Holly. Her reasoning/deductive skills sucked. And most of the book things just kept happening with her just stumbling upon it. I also thought it was far-fetched an adult woman would let a strange 17 year old just live with them after finding them in their attic, but I digress. Jade was just as much a mess since we know she’s “hiding” something and I just again could not get over the reveals surrounding her. We get a scattering of secondary characters, Ethan the handyman, Gail the realtor, and Serena the so called psychic. They don’t really help the book along though Gail’s character had some moments in the book and honestly wish we could have gotten her POV since it felt like we got everyone else’s.
The setting of the town felt fake to me. I don’t know. It just didn’t give me a town/beach community with a wealthy family. I just kept getting Ocean City, Maryland and I have no idea why.
The ending as I said was just bad. We get reveals on top of reveals and I called BS on the lot of them. Plus with one of the reveals, it made me go back to a certain POV and I went…so we are just going to ignore this whole thing? Okay then.
