The Fruitcake – Leah Orr

Four friends, one fruitcake, and a ritzy town full of secrets . . .What could go wrong?

When Holly Kelly moves from Miami to the lavish Laguna Palms neighborhood, seeking community and friendship—with her husband and rambunctious triplets in tow—she finds it in spades. She is soon drawn into the intimate lives of almost everyone in their beachfront cul-de-sac, especially her three new ride-or-dies: Gina, Greta, and Chloe.

But when the neighborhood’s holiday fruitcake exchange takes a dark turn, the bodies start piling up. The deaths seem like accidents—at first. Meanwhile, their upscale suburb on the shores of Hutchinson Island, Florida, is also being plagued by a series of disturbing disappearances. Men vanish, then reappear in the neighborhood . . . but changed.

The four friends decide to do some sleuthing of their own, and what they find chills them to the bone. When it’s Holly’s turn to deliver a fruitcake to the Hudson sisters on Christmas Eve four years later, she hears screaming coming from inside the house . . . many different voices—and they don’t sound female.

Can they uncover the twisted secrets of Laguna Palms before someone closer to home becomes yet another casualty?

Review

This was so over the place. I don’t really know what to make of this book.

So this is a short book; it’s barely 230 pages, considering that it also includes a little cookbook in the end, so that was cute. I also liked that we get a little drawing map of the cul-de-sac/what the order of the neighbour’s houses is like.

My issue with this book is that I just don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it was trying to be; I don’t know if it wanted to be a social commentary, which you can absolutely do with mystery-thrillers, but I just feel like it didn’t quite hit the mark, so I didn’t know if the book wanted to be that, or to be a drama, or just a thriller, or a horror thriller with a side of comedy. Like, it just changed so much; I just didn’t know what I was reading, and the narrations changed a lot, too.

There was too much going on that by the end I just don’t think the fruitcake was a main point. I guess the pacing was quick, but I took way too long to read this, especially considering it is about 211 pages of actual story. This shouldn’t have taken me so long, but I put it down so many times. I had to force myself a little bit to pick it up again to finish it.

As said, the pacing was good, and it flowed… I was just bored and confused because I didn’t know what this book was actually about, and the author didn’t make me 100% want to know what was happening. It was also a little bit cringey how Holly added random things in Spanish. It was just like, “Why is this here?”. I don’t know; I feel like a lot of times when authors want to insert random things in other languages, it just comes off as cringe.