This was my favorite of Darcy Coates books yet. I received this as an ARC and it was vastly different from her usual paranormal horror style. This story follows a group of tourists into a remote snowy mountain where one of them begins picking off the group one by one.

I'm not usually enthralled by whodunits, but I genuinely could not foresee the twists and turns this plot took. Not only did Coates do a great job at developing her characters to a point where virtually ANYONE could be the killer, but the plot was intricate, well thought out and the the background of the terrifying snowy landscape propelled the story in a magnificent way. I could not put this book down.

This was a crazy roller coaster of isolation horror and ‘who done it thriller’. I read this in almost one sitting and didn’t guess the twist until near the end.

Christa and her 8 travel companions (all strangers) get stranded in a mountain cabin during a fierce snowstorm. That would be horrific enough, without food or means of rescue. But then someone begins picking people off, one by one.

This gave me The Thing vibes with its wintery isolation and the every man for themselves attitude. Who’s the killer.? Who’s got motive? The characters were all well fleshed out and realistic. I really liked the main character, Christa, and her analytical way of looking at things. She could be a homicide detective.

Awesome book, great characters and terrifying setting!

Thank you netgalley and poisoned pen press for the e-arc of this book.

In this rollercoaster ride of a thriller we follow our main character Christa. Christa is on a trip with her boyfriend and other groups of people to the Rocky Mountains when due to unfortunate circumstances they slowly start getting picked off one by one.
I really had a great time reading this. This book is very action packed and will leave you on the edge of your seat.

Thank you Netgalley and Poised Pen Press for a copy.

“Something’s not right.
Not right.
Not right.
We’re all going to die.”

❄️Whodunnit
❄️Thriller/Mystery/Horror
❄️Gore
❄️Closed Room
❄️Atmospheric
❄️Short Chapters

I devoured this book in one day! It had me nervous, on the edge of my seat, flipping through page after page. It’s a thrilling horror of whodunnit. This author not only tricked me once but over and over again. Bravo, Darcy Coates! You nailed it.

My first Darcy Coates and wow! This was a horror-rific, bone chilling thriller. Filled with suspense with screams and chills.
I was afraid to go to sleep last night!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you @NetGalley and the author for allowing me to read this book early. Thisbook was amazing! It was fast paced. It’s about the main character and her boyfriend going on a trip to a lodge in the winter. A tree blocks the road. Things start happening and one by one they are picked off. Tensions rise the more this story unfolds. The ending was great! Definitely recommend this book.

I absolutely loved this! Reading a wintery book in summer wasn’t a vibe that I thought I was a fan of, but here we are!! Can’t wait to read more by the author.

Thank you @poisonedpenpress @netgalley for my digital copy. My thoughts are my own.

A group of strangers trapped in a remote cabin during a blizzard with no way out and a rising body count of GRUESOME murders…this one has all the elements I love in a thriller and it kept me turning the pages!

Christa and her boyfriend are traveling on a tour bus with 8 strangers to a remote lodge in the Rocky Mountains. However, when the bus stops for a tree in the road, a blizzard overtakes them and Christa’s boyfriend disappears in the snow. While many of the others have a callous attitude about his disappearance, some do help Christa search for him. The search is unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the group is trapped and forced to take shelter in an abandoned hunting cabin.

Late in the night their guide disappears and the next morning his severed head is discovered hanging on a tree. Everyone is terrified and one-by-one other members of the group are gruesomely murdered. Firewood is running out, phones have no service and the batteries are dying. Christa is worried about her boyfriend and she is trapped and doesn’t know who to trust.

Told from Christa’s point of view, this one WILL grab your attention from the terrifying first page! The other characters are all suspicious and you will love to hate them! I kept suspecting a character only to have them be the next one to die! The dramatic conclusion will surprise you. I highly recommend this one for lovers of murder thrillers.

A Winter themed Thriller that will have you suspicious of every character and guessing until the very end.

Another fantastic read by Darcy Coates!

While technically listed as a Horror genre, I think this fits better in the Thriller genre as this is what a Thriller SHOULD BE!

So Thriller writers, sit up and take note please. This is what I expect to read when I pick up a Thriller.

I’m still working on Coates’s backlog but am so happy to be reading this current release as well.

Thanks to @poisonedpenpress and @netgalley for the chance to read this #arc.

I will happily read any @darcybooks that she writes! 😜❤️

Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates is a heart-pounding murder mystery that ratchets up the suspense and escalates the bloodbath until the final scene. Although I had correctly figured out the killer and their motive about half-way through the book, the twists and turns of the plot kept me guessing and second-guessing until the very end. This book is a bit more graphic and gory than I usually prefer, but fans of Ruth Ware and Megan Miranda will most likely enjoy this offering from Darcy Coates. A perfect read for a snowed-in weekend.

I absolutely loved this story...It was mysterious, kept me guessing , causing you to look over your shoulder with each page. What was meant to be a seemingly well planned couples getaway turns into a nightmare . Its a book about survival of the fittest and has you questioning everyone around you and their motives . It makes you view winter in a different way as well as makes you think about who you can trust when you have to put your life in others hands

Join Christa on her trip to the mountains! Except this is not the holiday she'd been hoping for when her bf an the tour guide go missing in a storm, this trip quickly turns into a nightmare. As Christa has to be confined in close proximity to eight strangers, one of which seems to think killing is a sport, she needs to sort out who she can trust and find a way to stay alive.

Thank you NetGalley for this suspenseful read!

Darcy Coates’ Dead Of Winter traverses familiar thriller territory, but does so in an assured and very entertaining way.

When Christa and her boyfriend, Kiernan, join a tour group heading deep into the snowy expanse of the Rocky Mountains, she is hopeful that this will be her chance to put the ghosts of her past to rest. But when a bitterly cold snowstorm sweeps the region, the tour bus is forced off the road by a fallen tree. After becoming separated from the group, Christa rejoins them in an abandoned hunting cabin. The plan is to wait out the storm and then go for help.

Deep in the night, however, their tour guide goes missing, only to be discovered the following morning, his severed head impaled on a tree outside the cabin. Terrified, and completely isolated by the storm, Christa finds herself trapped with eight total strangers. As the storm grows more dangerous and the number of survivors dwindles one by one, Christa must decide who she can trust before this frozen mountain becomes her tomb.

This is a first rate thriller. Darcy wastes no time in setting the scene and the pace never falters from the tense ‘lost in the blizzard’ beginning to the final twisty outcome. There is nothing startlingly new about the set-up, but Darcy does it very well. The claustrophobia of being stuck in the cabin with a possible killer is well conveyed and believable, and the cast of characters are nicely diverse and credibly flawed. The descriptions of the snow and are also evocative and Darcy really makes you feel the cold. Christa is also a good central narrator, who grows with the story.

Experienced thriller readers will probably be expecting the ending, but it is very well done and I could not put it down.
Rating rounded up to 5

I had fun with this one. It won't be a new favorite Darcy, but was still a good time. This did follow the typical formula for an isolated one by one thriller, so nothing was really that surprising. I was hoping to be a bit more thrilled.

Dead of Winter by new to me author D. Coates, published by PPenPress, is a full-length, stand-alone thriller. An poetic nailbiting story, unputdownable with great love to details.
A remote cabin, snowed in with 8 strangers who are in for the ride of their lives.
A breathtaking adventure, fast paced, complex and complicated had me the story in suspense til the last page.

Thanks to Darcy Coates, Poisoned Pen Press, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Spoilers

This was an okay thriller, though the premise has been done. My chief complaints are the abrupt beginning and ending as well as the length/lack of energy, all of which relates to the main problem, a lack of sympathy for the lead character.

So we start out with a cold open, Christa lost in the snowy wilderness, looking for Kiernan, everything already messed up. This goes on for longer than one would expect before of course flashing back to the start of the trip and explaining how the cold open happened, leading back to present. This isn't a new way to begin a story, but for some reason this cold open felt extra abrupt to me. I was expected to feel concern and sympathy and fear for characters I knew nothing about. When Kiernan vanished and Christa was desperate and heartsick, I felt nothing, because their relationship meant nothing to me. I hadn't seen it develop, knew nothing about either of them. So you and your boyfriend decided to go walking around unfamiliar territory in bad conditions you weren't prepared for. I'm really not surprised that brilliant decision ended with one frostbitten and one missing presumed dead.

Yeah, we definitely started out with a deficit in sympathy for Christa that unfortunately carried through the novel, which went on, and on, and on. I tuned out at spots in the middle and was still able to follow along. Ironically, I would've actually recommended showing more of Christa and Kiernan's relationship in the beginning to endear them to the reader; but the middle needed to be--haha--butchered. (Inside joke.) Maybe a more sympathetic, charismatic, proactive lead would have energized the novel so the length wouldn't have been felt, but as it is it just felt like things kept happening to them but nothing except panicking was being done. And I mean, you can only describe the fear and trauma a character's going through so many times before the reader goes numb to it.

As for the ending--I can't decide if the multiple red herrings were ridiculous or clever. Leaning toward ridiculous, because when the head rolled down the stairs, I was at the point where I just rolled my eyes, because of course. The villain's let-me-stop-and-explain-everything-to-you-so-you-can-bask-in-my-brilliance monologue was a portrait of the narcissism and arrogance of a psychopath. Cliche, but probably realistic; I can't imagine the villain just killing Christa without bragging.

What was abrupt about the ending was literally the end. Rescue was imminent, cut to black. No aftermath, no epilogue, no life-after-trauma. I'm not a fan of those kinds of endings. I need more closure than that.

Overall not the best Darcy Coates book. She can do better. I prefer her ghost stories to her thrillers. The Gravekeeper series remains my favorite.

great locked room mystery! I really enjoyed this one!

thank you netgalley and to the publisher for the review copy

Loved it!! I would give it 4.5 stars. This is one vacation I would not want to go on. I probably would have died in the snow. Between the endless snow, being stuck in a tiny cabin with strangers, no food or electricity and also a killer. From the start I was suspicious of everyone, but in the back of my mind I always had one person who I thought it had to be. I ended up being right, but at times I waivered. Different people kept moving up on my list, but I always had one person in mind. He/She was smart to be able to pull this off, but definitely crazy. What type of person does this??? There were so many twists and turns. The story kept me guessing until the end. The killer put so much energy into getting revenge. I'm not sure why he/she blamed some of these people. They really had nothing to do with what happened.

Definitely recommend the book. It was a great mystery/thriller. Loved the characters, story and writing style. This was the first book I read by the author and I look forward to reading more.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Poisoned Pen Press, through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates
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A group of people are stranded by a winter storm on their way to a vacation resort. They are stuck together in a small shelter. When someone is killed they realize one of them is a murderer.
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What I liked:
-This gave excellent “And Then There Were None”, vibes. Kudos on that. It was written really well where each person felt suspicious at a point.
-Loved the setting! The isolation was believable and the weather hindered attempts at escape.
-The build up to the ending was really good, I can’t even think of better adjectives but I was loving my time reading this.
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4.5⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 Very entertaining! Definitely enjoyed!

3.5 stars. 10 people are on a bus to a secluded mountain vacation lodge to unwind and disconnect, little do they know that they are about to be hunted and savagely murdered. Very descriptive writing, skimmed some of the descriptions. Characters are moderately developed, can’t say I felt much of a connection to any but main narrator, Christa. Full of twists and turns. I did not figure out the ending. The ending was not satisfying for me, don’t want to say more and give out spoilers but it definitely lacked closure for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Press for my electronic advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.