NetGalley ARC | Dead of Winter

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was my first Darcy Coates book and I LOVED it. I loved it so much that I immediately checked out every other book available at our library. Some I also loved, some I hated, and some were meh. Like with Ruth Ware's books, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Coates' books. But, when she writes a five-star read, she really knocks it out of the park.

I went into this one with caution. Anything compared to And Then There Were None automatically gets a one-star deduction from me, because NOTHING can compare to one of the greatest mystery novels of all time. Fight me if you disagree.

And while Coates did earn that star back, please do not mistake that as me saying this is on par with None. It isn't. But it is an incredibly well-written, tense, horror-filled book that I enjoyed immensely. I figured out what was really going on after the main character, Christa, revealed the accident that changed her life, before the big reveal, but that did not change my enjoyment at all. Sometimes it's great to be right - when the book is good.

Christa and her boyfriend Kiernan join a small tour group comprised of individual travellers, a married couple, and father/son duo. Their tour guide, Brian, is leading the group but on the way to their destination, a massive snowstorm comes through, making the road impassable when a tree falls across the road. Knowing they can't stay on the bus and freeze, they seek shelter and find an abandoned hunting cabin to hole up in, hoping to wait out the storm. There are 11 to start with, and many will die.

As their first night in the cabin comes, Christa is injured and Kiernan has disappeared after he and Christa were having a look around, and the slope they were on gave way into nothing. By morning their tour guide is missing and at first the group wonders if he's tried to go for help. Within a short time the group discovers the truth when they find his severed head impaled on a tree not far from the cabin.

The tension is palpable upon the discovery as they realize one of them is a murderer. They're trapped on a mountain with no way to escape, the bus is useless, no cell phone reception, and very limited supplies. There's no way of knowing who to trust when it becomes clear that it must be one of them. They're terrified, exhausted, and hungry. Not exactly prime condition for thinking clearly - which none of them can do, except the killer, who has planned it all perfectly. They're constantly questioning each other, which leads to more anger and resentment. The stress of having to sit next to someone, in a freezing cabin with no food, who might be a murderer, was well-written and I could feel it myself as though I were there.

Despite being a large cast, I did not have trouble keeping them straight, something that's not always easy with a large number. They were each district enough that I wasn't constantly scrolling back to see which backstory went with which character. As they share information about themselves, their careers in particular, you can start cnnecting the dots to see WHY they are all on the mountain together, even if you don't yet know WHO had engineered it.

Given the violent and bloody ways that each was killed, I would definitely classify this as horror, with psychological/thriller elements present. Truly gruesome, especially the thing with the teeth, which I will leave you to discover for yourself.

Highly recommended.