Christa isn't a fan of a trip into the mountains during winter but her boyfriend planned a trip to share where he grew up. She can't say no to that. She keeps an open mind about it and tries to enjoy herself. They meet some of their fellow guests on the bus ride out to the cabin and she can tell they won't become overly friendly with any of them. The winter scenery is beautiful and when a tree blocks the path, Christa and her boyfriend decide to hike up to beautiful viewpoint. That's where it all goes wrong. A winter storm comes up suddenly and seperates Christa and Kiernan, her boyfriend. Christa wasn't prepared for this weather. She isn't the outdoorsy survivalist type. She needs to find the group. But everything just keeps going from bad to worse.....

This book was phenomenal!! A completely spellbinding thriller that had me questioning everyone's motives. It's a secluded killer/thriller that grabs you from the first page and never lets go. Highly recommend!!!! My heart was beating out of my chest and the twists just kept coming!

After reading The Haunting of Ashburn House, I've instantly become a huge Darcy Coates so naturally, I couldn't pass up the chance to read her other books.

Dead of Winter is another masterpiece by Darcy Coates. This is the story of guilt-ridden Christa who joins a tour group with her boyfriend Kiernan in the Rocky Mountains with 6 other people. Little does she know that time supposedly spent relaxing in the mountains is going to end up becoming a fight for survival.

Gripping, creepy, and unputdownable, the book got my rapt attention from the first page until the last. I had my theories while reading the book but when the killer was finally revealed, I was proven wrong and that's a good thing but no one likes a predictable book, right?

Thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

My thanks to Poisoned Pen Press, Darcy Coates and Net Galley.
Well, I'll tell ya' what. This damn story got me! Seriously, got me! The cold. The butt jobs that I shared the cabin with. "So, maybe it was a character, but it felt like I was there!"
Me? Hell, I'd have been looking everywhere for a weapon! People who can't find weapons? Phtts. That's nuts!
Truly? I adored this damn book! Ms. Coates is often hit or miss with me, but good god, y'all! This was some decent story telling!

3.75
I wanted sooo bad to love this book and give 5 stars.
The concept and beginning sucked me in and excited me. The first incident found surprised me. I happily read on. The atmosphere was great and the suspense. However, for myself, I found after that I never cared about any of the characters. They did not have depth and I just felt they were pawns for the story. I did not really care when or how they would go really and i knew they would. I also knew the main character had some experience that would be a main plot point so none of that excited me any. I did like the few surprises and struggles but not enough to stay invested in the parts that dragged as they wondered who did it. I love Darcy coates writing so much but is not my favorite one.

This book started out very strong, grabbing your attention from the very first sentence. This is a fast pace, edge of you seat thriller. The middle of the book felt slightly repetitive but picked back up again towards the end. At one point I had guessed the twist at the end but then talked myself out of it. By the time I got to the twist, I was only slightly surprised.

i like to read my books with a monthly theme so this is on my tbr shelf for now. excited to read this i know the author has some popular books out already

WOW! WOW! WOW!
I knew it, I just knew it! Or maybe I just wished I knew it but wasn’t shocked, just happy after going back and forth that maybe I was wrong. Such a great murder, mystery, horror book.
Please write more like this, because I enjoyed it so much. I finished it in under 24 hours, would have been sooner if I could have escaped life around me.

Amazing writing, hard to put down, page turner. The suspense was killing me and I loved it.

10 people head to a lodge in the Rocky Mountains. An isolated 2 week vacation far away from civilization and surrounded by snowy blizzards and mountains. Their bus stops because of a tree across the road, just before they reach the Lodge.

Some go off to see the scenery and get lost, while others are cutting the tree. Some get lost and some find a small cabin to see refuge. Cold and frozen they stay the night, lost, hungry, tired, cold,1 is hurt, so they stay the night. What awaits them as they wake up the next morning is gut wrenching and horrific. Things keep on happening as they try to survive. You will not be able to put this down!

OMG, my kind of book, movie and murder mystery!! Absolutely loved it.

I have read a lot of Darcy Coates and most of them have been of the supernatural variety. I was intrigued by a story that didn't involve the supernatural and was sucked in just as quickly with this as I have been with all of her others.

Every time I felt like I had figured it out, something would happen and I would be back and square one. I am sure that was the intent. I was fully engrossed and couldn't put this down. While I did have to suspend belief, I do that with almost all books I read and simply let the author tell me their story. Each character had their own personality and I would get mad and frustrated just as I would if I was interacting with them. I connected with some and was like "yes, yes, do that!" while reading.

* I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

5/5
This eerie novel ‘Dead of Winter’ by Darcy Coates follows Christa who travels with a tour group into the Rocky Mountains, but a snowstorm forces them to stay in an abandoned cabin and wait for the storm to pass. However, as morning comes one person is dead and the murderer is among them. They must ask themselves who can they really trust!

I have to admit that I love anything that has a cabin in the woods trope. What made it even more exceptional was the fact that I couldn’t guess the killer! This book had me on the edge of my seat and it was filled with many twists and shocking surprises.

Thanks to @netgalley and @poisonedpenpress for this incredible ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Keep watch for this chilling novel is due for publication on 11th July.

How could a vacation opportunity for Christa to spend time with her boyfriend in a beautiful resort out in the Rockies turn into a nightmare? As if a blizzard, eight strangers with seemingly no connection stranded a tiny cabin and no connection to the outside world isn’t enough…….. macabre attacks on the group  start singling them out, killing them: think Agatha Christie.
   The story, while gripping, was slow moving. That was until you hit Chapter 55 and it all came together in a rush and took off like a rocket. The compilation of this group wasn’t random, as we learn, and the planning of it had taken years: this was revenge at the highest magnitude.
   A horror story told in explicit detail, it has the reader cringing on every page. And just when you think the end is near, a whole new shock rocks whatever you expected.
   A compelling read for the lover of horror and murder mystery.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

***

I stayed up until 4:30 AM to finish this one, which is a common theme with Coates books. I love her brand of cozy horror, but this was certainly a departure from the last few haunted house books I have read.

There's a killer on the loose picking off stranded tourists hunkered down in a desolate cabin lost somewhere in a mountain snowstorm. I was engaged and needed to finish this one in a single sitting.

I was able to guess the killer about halfway through the book, but I still enjoyed the ride.

2.5 stars

I usually enjoy whodunit mysteries with isolated settings, but this one fell short. I thought I would enjoy the wintery setting and the tension the weather would provide, but it soon grew tiresome, as there's only so many times you want to read the same descriptions about people trudging through a blizzard.

The story was also full of one-dimensional characters making stupid decisions. I got so frustrated wondering why those idiots kept going out on their own with a killer on the loose? You'd think they'd learn their lesson after the first couple of people were brutally butchered, but no...they just kept going out on their own and getting killed.

Finally, my first five star read of the year!

After an initial struggle to get off the ground, this turned into one amazing book. I was truly hooked from start to finish, finding any spare few minutes to read just that little bit more. Despite reading this in the middle of summer, I felt the harsh chill of the icy mountains and shivered during the long cold nights spent in that isolated cabin. My stomach churned at the macabre displays left for them each day and I felt the fear and suspicion as they all started to suspect each other. All of the characters were well fleshed out and I never had trouble telling them apart. The only bad thing I have to say about this book was the fact I correctly predicted the outcome from the second chapter. It was so obvious I was screaming at the pages, willing someone to see it. Or not see it to be fair. I will always recommend Darcy Coates for bringing that little extra to the table every time.
Publishing July 2023.

Thank you to NetGalley, Poisoned Pen Press, and Darcy Coates for granting me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Dead of Winter takes place in a cabin, in the middle of a snowstorm, far up a mountain. When 8 strangers find themselves stranded there they are hoping to wait it out, that is until people start turning up dead.

If I am being honest, this was not my favorite Coates book. However, Coates will forever be an auto buy author for me. It was not that I did not think this book was outstanding, however that thriller, who-done-it storyline is not my favorite; especially considering that I am more of a fantasy or romance reader. There were however, several aspects of this book that I did appreciate. One being that it was difficult to discern who the killer was right up until the end. I suspected all but Christa at different points of the book. While I could figure out some of the big twists as the story goes on, the one I could not get was the killer, which makes it all the better. This was a very well set up story with a great presence, and a fabulous take on popular tropes. For me, my three-star rating simply came down to the fact that if this was not a Coates book, I likely would not have picked it up. It was my love of the author that attracted me to this book and if you are a bigger thriller person than I am, I am certain this book will be your next 5-star read.

Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates definitely reminded me a little bit of "Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. Not the same but similar as to the whodunit aspect with a tinge of gore which I appreciated very much.

A group of strangers are traveling together on a 12 day get away when they get stranded in a winter gale. They find a log cabin to lodge in until rescue comes. Until they slowly start getting murdered one by one. Someone is the murderer amongst them. Are they really strangers?

The start was a bit slow for my liking. The middle was alright, and the last ¾ was where all the action was. I'm not sure if it's because I truly didn't connect with the MC. I found Christa annoying, and lacked common sense/better judgement. Being in her brain for 300+ pages wasn't great. She was that girl in horror films that did EVERYTHING wrong.

I felt the murders were a little repetitive and not creative. Getting murdered in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter... there's other ways than getting ____________ on repeat. The characters were hard to connect with. It may have been the authors intention to keep the reader in the shadows regarding the characters but... still. Another downfall: I figured out immediately who the murderer was and how they were connected. For a thriller junkie as myself it wasn't difficult to figure out.

It's not a story that stands out amongst all of the thrillers I read, but it wasn't awful and was a good read.

Thank you Darcy Coates, Poisoned Pen Press, & NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I was given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.


For starters, I will say that I very much so enjoyed this book. It was a very unique and fun take on a classic, stuck in the middle of no where horror.

I have read a ton of Darcy Coates horrors and have enjoyed them all. This particular one, while I think was very predictable in the "who" the butcher was, was fun and entertaining. She did a great job of building tension and fear in the survivors and made it so it was interesting to see what they would do and who they would point to as the murderer next.

The only issue I had with it is that it was easy to see who it was going to be in the end, despite there being an obvious attempt at a "twist." It didnt spoil the fun for me though.

As for the author and her work in general, I find them fun, light horror reads that are always entertaining and enjoyable. I think that the character development needs more work but outside of that, great.

A group of people stuck in a blizzard while on route to a skiing vacation; they try to find refuge in a local cabin but then the bodies start turning up. In the tradition of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None", this book is a thriller/horror novel about a woman named Christa who has to find her strength to survive frostbite, very little food or heat and most of all a murderer on the loose. Christa and her boyfriend Kiernan are on a bus headed for the Blackstone Lodge in the Rocky Mountains. The couple haven't been together for all that long but are very much in love. They are traveling with 6 other people when a blizzard hits and a big tree across the road prevents them from going any further. With no cell phone service and little in the way of provisions, Christa and Kiernan decide to go for a walk to see if they can find any help when Christa falls down a hill and Kiernan disappears.

I wish we would have got to know the other people on the bus before they were stranded because it took me quite awhile to tell the characters apart. I know the author wanted to conceal some of the twists but a few sentences about the various characters would have been helpful. Christa cannot find Kiernan and the group walk until they find an abandoned cabin which provides a little food and shelter from the storm. Then people start to go outsides for fresh air or a bathroom break and they are found dead in a very gruesome fashion. Is one of the remaining 7 a murderer or is someone else stalking the group? And Why?

The author does a good job in describing the storm and the difficulties in braving the weather even resulting in frostbite, I thought the killer's identify was obvious but it did not prevent my enjoyment of the book. The book stalls a bit in the middle when the story keeps repeating itself but then it gets very exciting towards the end as Christa and the others left are trying to gather their wits and their strength to survive, There were some twists I didn't see coming and I enjoyed the scary elements and the feelings of claustrophobia while they were trapped in the cabin. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this ARC in exchange for a review.

My first read by author Darcy Coates. This novel was well written! Coates had this reader feeling claustrophobic,
wanting to yell Don't Go Out There, and in general totally engrossed in the read. The only thing , I had figured out who the culprit was before the end. If I hadn't have done that, it would have rated a 5 star.

I am a big fan of Darcy Coates and Dead of Winter continues her streak of awesome horror novels. This book was full of suspense and a wonderful sense of dread. I love isolation horror and this really scratched that itch.

Christa joined the tour group for their journey deep into the Rocky Mountains. She had hoped that this would be the trip that would finally allow her to put her past behind her. But as fate would have it, she was about to be thrown into a terrifying situation that would leave her fighting for her life.
The group found themselves trapped in an abandoned hunting cabin after a bitter cold snowstorm hit the region. Christa tried to remain calm, believing they would be safe as they waited out the storm. But when their tour guide disappeared in the middle of the night, only to be found the next morning with his severed head impaled on a tree outside the cabin, Christa knew they were not alone.
As the storm grew more dangerous and the group dwindled in numbers, Christa found herself trapped with eight strangers, one of whom was a cold-blooded killer. She couldn't trust anyone and the fear of not knowing who the killer was made her uneasy. The eerie silence of the cabin was only disturbed by the sound of the wind howling and the sound of footsteps in the night.
The killer was toying with them, picking them off one by one. Christa knew that she had to stay alive, but with every passing moment, she felt her chances slipping away. The paranoia was getting to her and she was unsure who to turn to. Was it the friendly old man, or the quiet couple in the corner? As the tension grew, she knew that she had to make a decision before it was too late.
This book had me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. Darcy Coates has done an excellent job of creating a suspenseful and eerie atmosphere that leaves the reader wanting more. The twists and turns in the plot kept me guessing until the very end. If you're looking for a heart-pounding thriller that will leave you breathless, then look no further than this book. It will have you hooked from the first page to the last, leaving you wanting more.