Almost all of us have taken long-planned vacations that turned out to be much less enjoyable than we had hoped. But THE VACATION takes us on a trip so filled with gloom, anger, profound disappointment, paranoia and near-madness that we might avoid future vacations for fear that they be anything like the one T. M. Logan describes so vividly in this excellent mystery novel.

There are 12 characters in the story, each bearing ugly scars, secrets and deeply hidden problems primarily due to past misdeeds. Four of them are 40-year-old women who have been best friends since college but have rarely communicated in 10 years. They love each other. But they all have hurt each other in the past, and those harms and horrors are slowly and painfully forced back into their memories and revealed to us as the story proceeds. Their husbands and children comprise the rest of the cast, and all of them are similarly troubled. So a lovely vacation at a mansion in a small French town becomes an ugly portrait of suspicion, fear and, yes, loathing.

"THE VACATION takes us on a trip so filled with gloom, anger, profound disappointment, paranoia and near-madness that we might avoid future vacations for fear that they be anything like the one T.M. Logan describes so vividly in this excellent mystery novel."

Kate, the only character who is a first-person narrator, is the sort-of main character, but Logan does a terrific job of developing, in detail, the tortured lives of each of the others. The main plot --- although there are several almost equally important subplots --- involves Kate’s obsessively paranoid suspicion that her husband is having an affair with one of the other women. And as the plot unfolds, details emerge that seem to indicate to her that first one, then another and then the other is the culprit who has stolen her husband.

The suspense grows exponentially. Every scene becomes darker than the previous one, while the threat of violence seems increasingly inevitable as love turns into hatred, fear turns into horror, anger turns into open conflict, and hopes for happiness turn into dread and destruction --- and the benign hills and valleys of youthful innocence devolve into the malignant mountains and chasms of guilt-fueled adolescence and adulthood. If you’re wondering why those metaphors are entirely relevant to the plot, read the book --- the whole book.

Meanwhile, the end of each chapter, along with the end of the novel, becomes a virtual --- and literal --- cliffhanger as we anxiously await the next tragic event. The conclusion effectively ties together all the plot threads, character entanglements and crashing climaxes.

Finally, those superbly conceived ingredients of suspense and surprise add up to a sumptuous set of several heart-stopping multiple climaxes as the mysteries are solved and our questions are answered. And, to be sure, they also add up to an emotional and thought-provoking mystery that lovers of the genre will happily and greedily consume.