Part of the Quick Reads Initiative, it is a short entry for a series of long books.

Roy Grace and his family go on a vacation to France - and everything goes wrong. The chateau, which looked as paradise in the pictures, ends up being an almost falling down ruin and the hosts appear to be anything but welcoming. And then things go really wrong - nothing is a it seems, even worse than what it looked like initially.

It is a good story of a nightmare vacation but... it is not a Roy Grace story - you could have replaced the name with any English policemen and nothing would have changed. Yes, Cleo and Bruno and the few other side characters are there but again... you don't need them. And by making it a Grace story, James lost some of the intrigue - you know that none of them can die which takes away from the atmosphere and the sense of danger. Plus I never understood how adding stories into long running series fits the point of the Quick Reads initiative - the idea is to get reluctant readers, ones that had stopped reading and the ones who never read to read and you don't do that with adding a story to a 17 books series... Although maybe that explains the remoteness from the series - it HAD to work for non-series readers after all. And arguably, it will actually work better if you don't know Roy Grace (although Bruno may annoy even more than he does usually).

Despite all that grumbling, I actually enjoyed the story for what it was. I wish James wrote stories a bit more often - I like his novels but he is not that bad at the shorter forms either if this is any indication. ( )