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Do You See What I See? by Peter Swanson. Rating: 4.25 stars.

Read from July 5th to 6th.

Before I get into the review, a quick thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers over at Harper Collins for allowing me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review. In Do You See What I See? we follow Nicholas who is a writer recently dropped by his publisher. His agent sends him to spend the holidays at the Cape Cod mansion of her other client, Marco Tavares. Marco needs help finishing his follow up to his hit thriller. But when Nicholas visits, Christmas cheer is in short supply and every visitor seems to have a motive to kill their host. As Christmas approaches, a single boozy night ends in two corpses leaving Nicholas to wonder if the whole thing was a setup from the start. Do You See What I See? comes out on October 6th and is available for preorder now.

This has been the smashing success of this year's Christmas in July. If I didn't have to wake up early this morning for work, I would have finished this in one sitting. It was so compelling. Which is a bit weird given that we miss out on the most action packed moments of the whole situation. We never see the murder or confront the murderer. And yet somehow I was hooked. I think Nicholas as a narrator makes a lot of sense for the story and he adds a layer of suspicion to the narration following the murders. We spend pretty much the entire novel not knowing who the murderer is, but we are led to believe a certain character may have been the one to handle the knife. And while I don't love sort of ambiguous endings, this one made sense and gave the reader enough of a nod that they can reasonably say who the murderer probably was. I was actually laughing at the final page of the novel because of how the sort of reveal was done. I liked the settings we followed the characters into, but it did lack some of the Christmas charm I was expecting.

The main drawback for this one is the length. At least for me. I know it appeals to a lot of readers to have this quick little Christmas Mystery stories, but I found I had a lot of questions and I wanted more time with certain characters (or should we call them suspects?). I once complained that a 750 page book wasn't long enough for me so we're not surprised that I found a novella to be too short. It just needed to be said. I also wish we had gotten a little more festive in the Cape Cod mansion. The characters did drink eggnog and there was a Christmas tree. But none of the scenes really gave a festive vibe. I know it's a Mystery, but humor me here.