A family vacation should create memories that last a lifetime.
For the Vale family, it may be the last thing they ever do.
Mara Vale is the kind of mother who plans for everything. She makes lists, packs emergency supplies, schedules every stop, and prides herself on keeping her husband, Daniel, and their two young children, Owen and Lily, safe.
So when Mara organizes a summer road trip into the mountains of Wyoming, her family believes she has planned the perfect getaway. There are roadside games, cozy diners, scenic hikes, horseback rides, and nights spent beneath endless western skies.
But Mara did not choose their destination by accident.
Every motel, restaurant, trail, and carefully timed stop has been copied from a notorious true-crime case involving Evelyn Rusk...a mother who brought her own husband and children to the same mountain town fifteen years earlier.
That vacation ended at an abandoned weather station.
No one was supposed to survive.
As the Vales unknowingly retrace the doomed family's final days, Mara's fascination with the case begins to reveal itself as something far more dangerous. Daniel notices gaps in her explanations. Owen senses that his mother is hiding something. Lily discovers evidence that their carefully planned vacation may actually be a reenactment.
And waiting at the final stop is a plan so calculated, so horrifying, and so impossible to escape that Mara believes she has accounted for every possible outcome.
But even the most meticulous plan can be destroyed by one forgotten detail.
Dark, atmospheric, and packed with escalating psychological suspense, The Vacation Murders is a chilling family thriller about obsession, betrayal, and the terrifying realization that the person responsible for keeping you safe may be the greatest danger of all.