My Killer Vacation

I came to this one after the Bellinger Sisters books left me in a soft spot for Bailey. I wanted something sunny and a little silly, the kind of book you read with sunscreen on your nose. What I got was still sunny, but with a dead body in the rental kitchen and a bounty hunter parked outside on a motorcycle. That mix is the whole pitch. It first came out in 2022, and the Avon paperback I read runs 384 pages, so it is a full summer book, not a thin novella with a murder taped on.

Taylor Bassey teaches second grade. She spends her workdays tying shoes, settling arguments over crayons, and keeping seven year olds from eating glue. She loves it in the tired way teachers love June. For vacation she talks her brother Jude into Cape Cod. Sun, naps, bad reality TV in a rental with a kitchen that smells like lemon cleaner. Brother and sister time, no parents, no grading. Then they find a corpse in the house. The tanning schedule, as Taylor jokes early and often, is officially ruined.

What I liked right away is how Taylor reacts. She does not go quiet or poised. She talks fast, she asks too many questions, and she immediately starts running through everything she has absorbed from true crime podcasts. She knows she is out of her depth, and she says so, but she also refuses to sit in the corner while strangers decide what happened in the house where she is sleeping. That stubborn streak could get annoying in another writer's hands. Here it reads as care. She looks after Jude. She looks after the rental owner who is panicked. She even tries to look after the cops, who do not want her help at all.

A corpse in the rental

The setup moves quick. Taylor and Jude arrive, they bicker the way siblings do when they actually like each other, they claim bedrooms, they make a snack run. The house is cute in that rented beach house way. White sheets, sand in the corners no matter how much you sweep, a deck that begs for morning coffee. Then the body. I will keep the details light because the discovery itself is part of the fun, but it is clearly murder, clearly tied to the house, and clearly not going to be solved by ignoring it.

Jude is younger, looser, funny in the way that makes Taylor roll her eyes and then laugh anyway. He is supposed to be the easy company on this trip. Instead he becomes one more person Taylor worries about. If the killer came through the rental once, what stops a return visit? That fear sits under all the jokes. Bailey does a good job letting the sunny setting stay sunny while the threat hums underneath. People are still getting ice cream. The ocean is still right there. And someone in town knows more than they are saying.

Taylor does what a lot of us would do. She Googles. She listens to old podcast episodes about rental scams and beach town crimes. She writes timelines in a notebook with a cute cover. She asks the neighbors leading questions and pretends she is just chatty. Some of it helps. A lot of it does not. The cops are polite in the way that means please stop. Jude tells her to let it go and then helps her anyway, because that is what brothers do when they are scared too.

The bounty hunter on the motorcycle

Myles Sumner arrives loud. Bike, boots, bad mood. He is in town to catch someone, and the corpse overlaps with his job enough that he cannot ride past it. His first impression of Taylor is that she is a hazard. Talking, theorizing, touching things she should not touch. His second impression, which he fights, is that she is brave. She stands her ground with him when most people back up. She is also kind to strangers in a way that catches him off guard.

Myles is the classic Bailey hero in some ways. Blue collar, physical, blunt to the point of rudeness. He left home about three years back and has been living on the road, taking jobs, sleeping lightly. He tells himself he likes it that way. No ties, no one to disappoint. Taylor reminds him of the home part without trying. She cooks, she fusses, she makes a rental feel lived in within a day. He notices, and he hates noticing.

Their early scenes are mostly argument as flirtation. She quotes podcast hosts at him. He tells her podcasts are entertainment, not training. She points out that second graders lie all the time and she can spot it, which is oddly persuasive. He tells her to stay out of it. She agrees and then does the opposite. The banter is fast and a little dirty, but Bailey keeps Myles from tipping into mean. When he is short with Taylor, the book lets us see the worry behind it. Someone has already died. Taylor keeps walking toward the danger with a notebook.

One small beat I loved: Myles tries to give Taylor a safety lecture, the kind men in these books love to give, and Taylor turns it around by asking about his own safety habits. Does he eat real meals on the road? When did he last sleep through the night? He has no good answers. It sets the terms for them. He can protect her body if she gets to poke at his habits. Fair trade.

Stuck together, come hell or high tide

The forced proximity here is simple and effective. After a scare at the rental, it becomes clear Taylor might be a target, or at least a witness someone wants quiet. Myles cannot in good conscience leave her unguarded, and Taylor cannot afford a bodyguard, and neither of them will admit they prefer sharing space. So he sticks close. Couch, deck chair, passenger seat. Jude pretends to be annoyed and is secretly thrilled, because now his sister has backup and he has someone to talk motorcycles with.

This middle stretch is where the book lives. Days have a rhythm. Mornings with coffee and theories. Afternoons checking out leads around town. Evenings cooking in the rental kitchen and pretending the sizzle in the room is just hunger for pasta. Bailey fills Cape Cod with small specific touches. A shopkeeper who remembers everyone. A rental manager who is defensive about locks and cleaners. A bar where locals go quiet when strangers walk in. None of it is fancy. It feels like a real town in July, busy and tired and a little nosy.

Taylor keeps trying to help, and Myles keeps trying to keep her at the edge of it. The compromise they reach feels true to both of them. She can come along for interviews where a friendly teacher face helps. She stays in the car for anything that might turn physical. She hates it. He hates enforcing it. They fight about it more than once, and the fights are good because both points are valid. She is an adult and this is her rental and her life. He has seen what happens when civilians walk into the middle of a hunt.

The attempts on Taylor's life, and there is more than one, raise the stakes without turning the book grim. Bailey keeps the tone light even when the danger is real. A brake scare. A break in that could have gone worse. A warning that lands too close. After each one, Taylor gets shaky and then angry, which felt honest to me. She does not become a sudden action hero. She cries a little, eats something salty, and then asks what they learned. Myles watches her put herself back together and falls a little harder each time, much to his annoyance.

Heat that asks first

Readers come to Bailey for heat, and this book delivers, but what stood out to me is how much checking in there is. Myles talks rough and then pauses to ask if Taylor is good, if she wants to slow down, if she wants to keep going. Taylor is direct about what she wants, which is refreshing. She is not shy about her body or her pleasure, and she does not play games to get Myles jealous. When they are together, the outside case fades for a while, and that relief is part of the point. For an hour, no corpse, no suspect list, just skin and breath and laughter when something squeaks.

The classroom side of Taylor never vanishes, and I mean that as praise. She explains things clearly. She notices when Myles shuts down and names it without shaming him. She uses her teacher voice on him once during a fight and they both crack up, which breaks the tension in a way that felt lived in. Myles, for his part, is good with Jude in the easy way of men who show care through tasks. He fixes a sticky door. He shows Jude how to check the rental locks. He does not give speeches. He just stays.

If you are new to Bailey, her style here is full of dirty talk and praise and a lot of physical detail. It is explicit and joyful, not dark. If that is not your thing, large parts of the middle will test you, because the romance gets a lot of page time while the mystery simmers. I did not mind, because the affection between them grows alongside the attraction. He learns her coffee order. She learns the tell he has when a lead bothers him. Those small domestic details do as much work as the bedroom scenes.

One note I appreciated: Taylor has boundaries and keeps them. When she is tired or rattled after a scare, she says so, and Myles backs off without sulking. When Myles gets closed off about his past, Taylor gives him room instead of prying it open with a podcast interrogation. That mutual respect makes the later conflict hurt more, because you believe these two actually know how to treat people.

When the case turns serious

About two thirds in, the book stops kidding around quite so much. A lead that looked solid falls apart. Someone Taylor trusted looks less solid. Myles gets a call about his original bounty that forces a choice between the job that pays him and the woman he is supposed to be guarding as a favor to his conscience. He chooses Taylor, but the delay costs them. The killer, who has been watching the rental more closely than anyone guessed, makes a bolder move.

I am staying vague on purpose about who did it and why, because untangling that is the best part of a mystery, even a cozy spicy one. The solution ties to the rental itself, to who had access and who needed the house empty or quiet at certain times. Taylor's notebook timelines, which Myles teased her about, turn out to matter. A detail about cleaning schedules and spare keys clicks into place. A neighbor's throwaway comment from way earlier returns with new weight. It is not the most complex puzzle Bailey could have built, and a sharp reader may guess the shape of it early, but the mechanics are fair. The clues were there.

The climax happens close to home, which I found scarier than a chase through town would have been. Home should be safe, especially a beach rental with your brother asleep down the hall. Bailey uses that. Doors, dark hallways, phones dying at the worst time. Taylor has to use her wits rather than strength, and she does, in a way that fits a teacher. She distracts, she stalls, she protects Jude first. Myles arrives in time because he finally stops trying to do it alone and calls for local help, which felt like growth rather than a rescue cheat.

Afterward, there is fallout. Taylor is angry that Myles kept parts of his work from her, even if his reasons were protective. Myles is angry at himself for letting feelings slow his judgment. They say clumsy hurtful things. Jude, to his credit, refuses to let either of them rewrite the whole vacation as a mistake. He reminds Taylor she was brave and smart. He tells Myles that leaving now would be cowardly, which is a bold thing to say to a large bounty hunter, and Myles actually hears it.

Where it sings and where it sags

The heart of this book is the collision between Taylor's warmth and Myles's armor. Bailey writes that collision well. Taylor is energetic without being ditzy. She is competent at her job, loyal to her brother, funny when she is nervous. Myles is gruff without being cruel. He is good at his job, loyal in his own wary way, tender when no one is watching. Watching them soften without losing their edges kept me turning pages past midnight more than once.

The mystery is the weaker half, and I say that fondly. It works, the clues line up, the danger feels real, but it rarely surprises. If you read a lot of murder mysteries, you will spot the likely culprit well before Taylor does, and you may get impatient when she chases a podcast theory instead of the obvious rental paperwork. I also thought the middle repeats one beat too often: Taylor insists on helping, Myles says no, danger proves him right, Taylor apologizes and then helps anyway. The variations are fun, but the pattern shows.

Pacing is otherwise brisk. Short chapters, lots of dialogue, chapters that end with a joke or a scare. The Cape Cod summer texture helps a lot. Salt air, crowded parking lots, outdoor showers, lobster rolls eaten over paper trays. You can feel July. The small town gossip network, which Taylor both uses and gets caught by, gives the investigation a social logic that paperwork alone would lack. People talk. People remember who rented what and when.

Who should pick this up? If you like romantic suspense where the romance leads and the suspense supports, this is your beach bag book. If you want a hard puzzle with red herrings on every page, look elsewhere. Content notes: murder, a corpse discovery, threats and home invasion scares, explicit sex with clear consent, some language, and a little violence in the climax. No cliffhanger for the main couple. They earn their happy ending.

A quick word on the newer Avon reprint, since editions of this book float around. The story first appeared in 2022 after Bailey's self published edition, with Piatkus handling the UK paperback that July. The Avon reprint adds a bonus novella called My Killer Role about Jude and Dante, two fan favorites from the main book. I liked that addition because Jude earns more page time and Dante, who circles Myles's work life, gets texture beyond tough guy. If you only want Taylor and Myles, you can stop at their last chapter and feel complete. If you want a little more time in that world, the novella is a sweet extra, lighter on murder and heavier on banter.

I closed the book liking Taylor a lot and trusting Myles, which is all I really ask from a romantic suspense. She taught me that competence can look like patience and snacks and clear instructions during panic. He reminded me that protection works best when it listens. Cape Cod will not feel quite so innocent next time I see a rental listing, and I mean that as a compliment to a vacation that went very wrong in a very fun way.