The Hitman's Daughter - Carolyne Topdjian

 

This isolated, closed circle mystery/thriller takes place in the Château du Ciel - a once luxurious hotel and ski destination that has declined in recent years and is rumored to be haunted.  A New Year's Eve party was supposed to revitalize the hotel until a massive blizzard traps the guests and staff inside.  We're following one of the hotel staff - Mave Michaels - when she finds another staff member dead.  She panics and, in her shock, thinks she sees someone else in the dark room.  However, when they review the security footage, no one else was seen entering or exiting the room - making Mave the prime suspect.  Mave insists she's innocent, but when the truth is revealed that Mave is the daughter of a notorious contract killer, everyone is quick to assume that Mave takes after her father.  The clock is ticking for Mave to figure out who the real killer is before the storm clears and everyone leaves the hotel.

TW/CW: sexual assault

This book felt like 3 different books all smushed together and each part is handled to different levels of success.  It is an isolated murder mystery, a gothic haunted house horror, and an action movie all rolled up together.  Each of these parts had their own moment to shine in the book, but overall I thought they made the book feel really scattered and inconsistent.  However, I may be in the minority on this one because the early reviews I scanned through on Goodreads all point out how fun and fast-paced the book was.  Of course, I'm reading an ARC copy so there's a chance some of this might change in the finished copy but I don't think it would change enough for me to really change my mind.  My main issue is that the action-movie aspects were so downplayed and almost non-existent that I honestly questioned why they were included at all.  

With a title like 'The Hitman's Daughter' and the line in the description about how her father trained her in survival tactics made me think this would be similar to the movie You're Next where the protagonist has a secret past that makes her way more of a threat than the bad guys initially thought. However, that was not the case. At least, that wasn't the case until Mave was cornered by someone and needed to fight her way out.  Then she would have this automatic switch where she was suddenly great at hand to hand combat and she'd get away from whoever it was.  I really thought, based on the wording, that she would have all these secret skills or at least be somewhat skilled in ways that we wouldn't expect.  However, Mave relies so heavily on other people to help her escape, hide, and sneak around that I really became skeptical about how much 'training' she got from her dad.  I basically didn't really see any actual reasons why her dad had to be a hitman other than the really convenient plot reasons that come in toward the ending.  I did really like the addition of having Mave hear her father's voice when she was close to giving up and having the voice sort of talk her through the situation with lines about calming her breathing and remembering that no one does anything for free.  But none of the advice was particularly hitman-centered so it very well could have been just normal dad advice. I just think for the hitman part to be so central to the plot and the title of the book, I wanted it to be much more integral. 

I did really enjoy the gothic horror aspects we got but, again, they were way under utilized until the ending. I wanted this hotel to be full-on haunted with the cold spots and the weird sounds and the whole floor being closed off because of some mysterious issue with the electricity.  One character says that of course there are rumors it is haunted - it is a big hotel, they're all haunted. But we never really see any more about those rumors until later in the book.  Maybe this isn't fair, but when you tell me a big hotel in the snowy mountains is haunted - I'm 1000% thinking of The Shining. All that being said, I did like the vibes we get from this being an old hotel and how much of the 'underbelly' we see following Mave's investigation.  I did find the creepy gothic vibes not really consistent throughout the book and I think having a more consistent tone would have really elevated the story for me. It was like the tone was creepy when it needed to be but otherwise the gothic-factor just wasn't there.  We really went full gothic horror with the ending which I loved but, again, didn't feel like the foundation of the story was built up enough to really 'earn' the amount of payoff we got.

Where this book did shine, for me, was with the murder mystery.  It had a very Knives Out feeling to it where all of these eccentric rich people are together and they all have their own secrets that may or may not be related to the murder that  happened. We also get these letters back and forth between two characters 30 years prior to the events in the book.  Initially, we aren't completely certain how these letters work within the current investigation but we do get the connection by the end.  I liked how short the letters were so we did get back to the main action-plot quickly.  Also, they gave the reader some backstory that Mave didn't know at the time which made it fun to guess how these two timelines would come together. I liked the way the investigation played out as well as the final reveals and twists.  I wouldn't say the reveals were anything too out of the ordinary but I did really like the way they all came together at the end. 

This read like a very plot-forward book, so the character development was a bit lacking for my personal preferences.  There is a pretty wide cast of characters but they can really all be summed up by their titles (the maid, the concierge, the son in law, etc) and they just didn't have much depth to them at all.  Even Mave was a bit bland mostly because of the conflicting backstory/actions that I've already touched on.  The main plot takes place over 36ish hours so it was understandable that there wasn't really much character development in the book so I was glad we got the epilogue from 1 year later so we were able to see how some of the characters turned out after the events of the book.  

Overall, this was a pretty solid isolated murder mystery but there was too much other stuff going on that really detracted from my enjoyment.  I think each plot branch was interesting at times but it was just too much all at once for me.  However, like I mentioned in the beginning, other early reviews are overwhelmingly positive so this might just be a me-issue.

Thanks NetGalley and Polis Books for the ARC

Expected publication is February 22, 2022