The Vacation

The Vacation by John Marrs is a standalone Psychological Thriller set against the sun-drenched backdrop of Venice Beach, Los Angeles — a place that sells the fantasy of reinvention to anyone desperate enough to believe in it. Eight strangers check into the same beachfront hostel, each with their own reason for being there, and not one of those reasons is quite what it seems. Originally published as Welcome to Wherever You Are, this re-edited and expanded edition showcases Marrs at his most structurally ambitious, building a mosaic of Morally Grey Characters whose lives are more tangled than any of them realise.

The cast is deliberately varied. Among them: an English nurse travelling Route 66 in tribute to a recently deceased patient, two Irish lads racing against an undisclosed deadline, a pole dancer fleeing henchmen sent by her own evangelical father, and an Englishman determined to shed his old self entirely. None of them are straightforwardly sympathetic, and that's the point. Marrs constructs each character through Multiple POV chapters that alternate between the present-day hostel and the past that drove them there, allowing Dark Secrets to surface gradually rather than in convenient bursts. The Multiple Timelines structure demands patience early on, but the payoff is a picture that shifts in meaning with every new piece of information.

What holds the novel's tension taut is the creeping sense that these eight lives are not randomly intersecting. Hidden Truths accumulate chapter by chapter, and the connections Marrs eventually draws between characters are earned rather than arbitrary. There's a strong current of Deception running through every storyline — characters deceiving each other, yes, but also themselves. Some are Protagonist with Trauma figures trying to outrun histories they cannot shake; others are operating in far murkier moral territory. The threat of violence is never abstract. The book states plainly that before the fortnight is out, at least one of them will be dead and another will be in jail, and Marrs makes the reader work to figure out who.

The reading experience is closer to a thriller in the classic ensemble tradition than a conventional whodunit. Longlisted for the 2022 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, it drew praise from Publishers Weekly as "intricate and captivating," and from Booklist for characters "beautifully drawn" and a story "constantly surprising." The Plot Twists are plentiful — some structural, some character-level — and Marrs layers them carefully enough that very few feel cheap. Readers who commit to the slower first third will find the final act considerably harder to put down.

For anyone already familiar with Marrs's work, The Vacation sits slightly apart from his more high-concept speculative fiction. The premise here is grounded entirely in human behaviour: in the choices people make under pressure, in Emotional Trauma that refuses to stay buried, and in the uncomfortable ease with which ordinary people become capable of extraordinary things. It's the kind of thriller that makes you reassess every character you thought you understood.