This was my first book by Darcy Coates, who I have heard a lot of good things about, and it did not disappoint. This was a thrill ride from start to finish, and while I did guess one tiny part on my own, there were numerous twists and turns that kept me from being able to predict where things where going to go.

This was a nice balance between horror and thriller, but be warned if you're queasy or sensitive in any sort of way, there are a several pretty gory parts throughout. Overall, this was a super exciting thriller that I could easily see people finishing in one or two sittings just because it's the type of book where you immediately want to know what's going to happen next.

This is a definite recommend and one of my fave reads of the year so far!

Too many characters and an easy to figure out suspect made this very confusing and not enjoyable for me. Giving it 3 stars because I can see why others would love it. It just didn’t hit a home run for me.

Christa and Kiernan are excited for their two week vacation in the mountains. They are taking a bus filled with a handful of other tourists up to the lodge when a fallen tree in the road stops them in their tracks. The tour guide reassures them they can quickly take care of the tree and be on their way, he encourages them to walk around but not go too far because there is about to be a horrible winter storm. Despite his warnings, people venture off and find themselves in danger. Trapped in the middle of a snowstorm, the group of tourists find an unlocked cabin and take shelter and from there, the snowy, isolated nightmare begins.

This is the second book I have read by this author and her ability to completely freak me out is insane. Just like her other book, I found myself holding my breath due to genuine fear. My *only* complaint was I had a hard time keeping track of characters at first. There were 9 other tourists on the bus and I just don’t think they were well developed enough for me in the beginning to keep track of their names and who they were within the story. It wasn’t until I was about 70% in that I could finally recall who was who. I really enjoyed how short the chapter were, it made the read super easy! The plot twist was INSANE and I was amazed with how the author brought it all together.

This murder mystery/ whodunit was filled chilling, filled with gore, suspenseful and terrifying. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.2 from me!

Darcy Coates, as always, delivers an amazing read. Christa finds herself trapped in a cabin in a snowstorm and chaos and death ensue from there. I couldn’t put this one down and highly recommend you read it for yourself!

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

I'm a big fan of Darcy Coates ghost stories. This is the first thriller I've read of her, and I'm just not a fan.

By Chapter 3, you know who the killer is. If you read past Chapter 3, you'll be inundated with clumsy red herrings that make it even more obvious who the killer is. It was painstaking, and I just couldn't take the rest of the book seriously.
Coates did create an atmospheric read, and the deaths via decapitation were particularly brutal. However, both of those things are repeated ad nauseum that they lose impact on the reader.

Darcy Coates - all the feelings and scary vibes. This one will be popular - I have no doubts! 4.5 stars for me.

Many thanks to PoisonedPen Press, Net Galley and Darcy Coates for the opportunity to review this advanced reader's copy of Sead of Winter.

Christa is headed to the Rocky Mountains on a tour bus with 8 strangers. On the way to their destination, a beautiful lodge in the mountains, they find themselves stranded in a powerful snowstorm. The group finds shelter in an abandoned hunter's cabin. With the temperature dropping, claustrophobic quarters and limited resources, the group tries to survive the storm. When their tour guide is found butchered and decapitated, they realize the storm is not the only threat they must survive.

I was pleasantly surprised by this new and exciting read. This author is usually hit or miss for me, with my favorites being The Haunting of Leigh Harker and Parasite. I was excited to see the author used a little more graphic detail in the scenes. The character development was just enough to give you a good picture of each person, but not overly descriptive, which can sometimes be a make or break factor for some readers (like me!).

Overall, this was a creepy whodunnit with a cabin in the woods setting that I can never resist. It's full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing up until the very end.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in this freezing cold slasher, a compulsive page turner that doesn’t ever sit still.

These four stars are pretty generous… ultimately, I had fun reading this book, which is what matters. It really does parallel a slasher film, moving from scene to scene, never lingering, with a steady and relentless body count. The setting is ripe for this kind of locked-door storytelling, and it delivers on its bloody, whodunit it premise. If that kind of piece of the genre pie is what you’re in the mood for then this novel will serve you well. It is a quick read, hard to put down, and does exactly what the cover promises.

With that said, I wasn’t in love with this book. The characters all felt thin, and I didn’t really have any reason to care about any of them except for the main character/narrator, and even she wasn’t super compelling. In many ways this does follow the slasher movie playbook, with most characters being little more than canon-fodder to pad the body count. I appreciated that, given the scenario, what we knew about the supporting characters was only what our protagonist knew, but that narrative unreliability provided an easy way to paint them rather two-dimensionally. On top of that, though, while the book was hard to put down, the writing itself wasn’t very compelling. The chapters were all remarkably short, which is the primary way the story is injected with tension. The story, and characters for that matter, could have been well-served by some longer scenes that offered us more than the “setup, twist, cliff-hanger” kind of narrative style that seemed to mark each chapter. Everything was so cut up and choppy I never felt any of the reality of the place and the mood. Going along with that disjointed feeling, there is a traumatic history that overshadows the narrator, and while it does serve a later plot point the way it is introduced and how it affects her just feels contrived, not in terms of story but in how it was presented. Also, there just seemed to be a decent amount of haziness around geography, and what a human could do in that weather/setting in any certain amount of time. To some extent there was an ambiguity because our narrator isn’t an expert, and any mystery requires certain levels of disbelief, but I was constantly doubtful of the opportunity or capacities for the killer to do what they did in the amount of time they did it, especially without freezing to death. Because these and a few other areas did stick out so awkwardly to me, I was able to guess the ultimate twist from more or less the beginning. The fuzziness in the writing kind of highlighted the red herrings for being just that, and all of the ambiguity and fuzziness felt like it was written backwards from the ultimate twist/narrative resolution, and so it called attention to itself in such a way that made the solution to the mystery kind of leap off the page, it pulled my attention to all the places the author shouldn’t have wanted me looking. I do consume a lot of horror entertainment, and while my guessing the ending was certainly aided by genre-familiarity, I just also felt the writing pointing toward it all along.

So, yes, I enjoyed this book, and I think a lot of readers will have a lot of fun with it, and since that is the purpose of this kind of book that is why it gets four stars. But it doesn’t really do much to push genre conventions or ideas, and instead leans into some of the easier/less- interesting tropes the genre has to offer. If you are looking for an exploration of character or anything that pushes against any boundaries, you will be disappointed. If you are looking for bunch of folks getting brutally murdered in spectacularly bloody fashion at a remote cabin during an isolating series of snowstorms, however, this book will make you wonderfully happy.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Poisoned Pen Press, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I am of fan of Agatha Christie's and Ten Little Indians. I thought I bet I can figure this out. But just when I thought I have it !...a twist, a red herring, a turn.
Christy and Kiernan are on a bus going on a winter adventure. 10 people on a two week stay. But the bus encourages a tree across the road. They decide to explore a little but a sudden storm separates them from the group and Christy from Kiernan. She is eventually found by the others who are in a small cabin after the bus becomes stuck in the snow. She gets the group to look for Kiernan but the search seems futile. Then the group dwindles as they are picked ofc one by one. Obviously, don't in the group is a killer whose favorite method is beheading.. They find Kiernan's body, beheaded. Will they find the killer or will everyone die?
The only problem I found was the end leaves some some questions. I would have liked an epilogue to wrap it up.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC. Darcy Coates, great book that kept me glued until late to finish

Wow!! This book totally surprised me! I don’t want to say too much about it, but I was completely hooked all the way through to the last page. This is my first Darcy Coates novel and it certainly won’t be the last. Oh the body horror! Everything about this book is not the “cozy horror” vibe Darcy Coates is widely known for. This is a brutal slasher novel that deserves its rightful place on the horror throne.

i received a digital arc of this book from netgalley, and i was excited to read it because i love the whole "and then there were none" premise in thriller books, but i have mixed feelings about this one. i was on board for a while, but it got kind of ridiculous and far fetched at points, and i saw the ending coming from a mile away (like... very early on. none of the other options made any sense lol). but that being said, it was still a fun and entertaining read, and i definitely didn't hate it, so 3 stars seems fitting. bonus points for the gruesome heads-impaled-on-tree-branches image tho. i *did* like that this was a thriller with actual gore at some points bc im tired of the usual non-graphic stab wound/gunshot/etc. idk what that says about me tho LOL

3.75
It’s impossible to say much because it is a mystery…I did figure out some things right away but missed an obvious clue because I got caught up in the violence and frankly I found it hard to always keep the characters straight. At one point during body #4 I’m almost positive there was a name mix up because I reread that part multiple times and it didn’t make sense…overall it was a fun ride, with some gruesome violence and great setting. I knocked it down a little for the ease in which I figured out some things and for the weirdly abrupt ending.

Eight strangers. One killer. Christa and her boyfriend go on a mountain resort trip which turns fatal for many members in their group. A killer is among them. Christa and the surviving members must piece together what connects them and brings them all on the same trip.
This thriller kept me guessing until the very end. When you think you know who the killer is, guess again.

I have been duped! Whatever this book is, it is not horror. It's like if Colleen Hoover wrote horror. Like the husband and kids have gone out for dinner and Mom is going to have a bath and a glass of wine and pick up this thriller. If you like the who-dun-it books with a few (fairly predictable) twists and turns, several beheadings, characters you kind of want to fight, and pages upon pages of descriptions of snow, then this is a good pick for you.

The description tells us that "someone in the group is killing for sport," but that's not exactly the case. I was so hoping that it would only be some maniac out hunting humans just for kicks. Alas, this is a revenge story which becomes clear early on. The unknown killer is (just a little) obvious a short way into the book if you're paying close attention, but the author does a pretty good job of making you doubt that prediction a few times throughout the story.

Most of the characters were annoying. Like, I didn't care about them before or after their decapitation. There was one who had potential, but you don't get to hear much from or about them for most of the book. And right when we do start to learn more from this one person, *SPOILER* our "butcher" buries an axe in her skull (but don't worry, she's still breathing).

I did appreciate that the author chose to just jump right into it in the very first chapter, no slow burn on this one. We are immediately dropped in with the main character and their partner in a panicked search through the forest during a blizzard (which literally never ends). Throughout the entire book, there's lots of snow and a little blood, but mainly there's snow. It's almost like someone thought you might forget that there was a snowstorm if you weren't reminded every other paragraph.

To summarize (because boy do I be rambling), the book is fine. Someone who enjoys mysteries/thrillers more than me will probably really like this book.


Thanks a million to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for the ARC!

***

Finished - review coming tomorrow. Not bad, but definitely not something I would pick up again.

***

04/17/2023: So far so... fine? I'm about a quarter of the way into this book, and I'm mostly finding myself annoyed with the characters. I was hoping for a little more horror and a little less who-dun-it thriller. But we persist!

This is an incredibly twisty story about a group of tourists on their way to a resort who get stranded in the Rocky Mountains. If you enjoyed "Ten Little Indians", this well-crafted story is a masterful telling of a group of potential suspects/victims being murdered. Just when you think one character is the murderer, the writer shifts your thinking to someone else, either through a murder or a clue. I couldn't put this one down because the story just kept moving and pulling me further into all the theories of the main character. All I can say is WOW.

Christa and her partner have embarked on an organised tour of the rocky mountains and he has gone missing. She tries to organise the other group members to conduct a search for him and they find their guides severed head skewered onto a tree outside the cabin. I found the writing really hard to take to and I had to give up at around 40%. It was a fairly quick read but the writing didn't grip me and I had to keep re-reading sentences.

A non stop thrilling novel about a group of strangers stranded in the mountains during a massive snowstorm. Time is not on their side as one by one they end up dead. So many twists it had me guessing till the very end. Couldn’t put it down!

3.5 stars round up to 4

I was excited to receive an eARC copy of Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates, thank you Poisoned Pen Press.

I flew through reading this because there is constant action, right from the first page. It reads like a blend of a psychological thriller and a traditional slasher horror which I loved but it was, in my opinion, a bit predictable.

📚 There is a lot of foreshadowing that is maybe a bit too telling as I figured out who the killer was nearly right at the start HOWEVER the constant action and desire to see how the reveal would play out kept me turning the pages!

🙋 The characterisation is very good, I like how it brought together a very diverse group of people and threw them into this situation together. It's interesting seeing how each of them responds to it.

📍For me the setting was the magic here. It's beautifully described and you can nearly feel the chill of the snow as you read. The isolation also reads in a very realistic way which is sometimes a failing of this genre.

👩‍🎓 This was a good, quick, easy read with loads of plot and just the right amount of introspection.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this and it would be perfect to curl up by a fire with on a cold day but I wish the twist had been a little but less obvious.

Claustrophobic with a hint of a closed room mystery in the middle of a snowstorm.

There are only a handful of characters in this story which I enjoyed as it made following the story much easier as your focus could be on the main characters. Kiernan was dating Christa who was loyal, likable, and strong. Brain was your typical tour guide, Hutch was easy going, Alexis was shy with a story of her own, Miri was married to Steve who was obnoxious, Denny was overbearing and his son Grayson was a typical surly teenager, Blake was bitter, and Simone was bossy and angry. And one of them was a murderer.

The plot was gripping and entertaining as the reader tries to figure out, along with the characters, who the murder is. I liked how the author let you form first impressions of the characters and then slowly gives you the backstory on each of them. The author takes you in one direction, and then an abrupt curve changes the whole scenario as you slip and slide trying to get traction again.

My review is voluntary and all comments and opinions are my own.

WOW! This book was a WILD ride! There were a few slower parts but the ending was amazing. I never guessed any of the twists. Everyone was a suspect the whole time! I wish I would have read this book in Winter but it was SO good!