Review: An Unwanted Guest

An Unwanted Guest | Shari LapenaPamela Dornan Books
2018
304 Pages

Rating: 3 Stars
Book 3/50 of 2019

Synopsis: 
It's winter in the Catskills and Mitchell's Inn, nestled deep in the woods, is the perfect setting for a relaxing--maybe even romantic--weekend away. It boasts spacious old rooms with huge woodburning fireplaces, a well-stocked wine cellar, and opportunities for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, or just curling up with a good murder mystery.

So when the weather takes a turn for the worse, and a blizzard cuts off the electricity--and all contact with the outside world--the guests settle in and try to make the best of it.
Soon, though, one of the guests turns up dead--it looks like an accident. But when a second guest dies, they start to panic. 
Within the snowed-in paradise, something--or someone--is picking off the guests one by one. And there's nothing they can do but hunker down and hope they can survive the storm--and one another.


This book disappointed me.  I rated it three stars because I did enjoy it, but it was really lackluster and I came away feeling pretty "meh" about it overall.  I was hoping for something like a murder mystery, but this wasn't quite that.  I also expected maybe something like a psychological thriller, but this wasn't that, either.  It was a little bit of both of those things, but I felt like it couldn't commit to one or the other.  

You meet all the guests at the inn - I believe there are ten - and follow them each for a short time for the beginning of the story.  This gives a little background on each person, and sets things up for when one of the guests is found dead.  I won't describe the characters because I don't want to give away who dies and who doesn't, but I will say that I never really connected to any of them.  I didn't find any of them particularly memorable.  Several characters had really interesting backstories and I wanted to find out more about them, but nothing ever really came of that.  We do learn a bit more about some of them, but that gives us more questions than answers.  I do not think ambiguity is a bad thing, and if there's a purpose to it then I'm fine with that.  But this wasn't that.  This wasn't ambiguity to enhance the story or make the readers think - it really felt like several of the threads were just dropped.

There was also a big twist at the end, and a few things throughout the book seemed - in retrospect - to be in service to that, rather than to the plot overall.  I didn't see the twists coming (the killer wasn't who I initially suspected, either), so I didn't have a quibble with that.  But ending on that and leaving other things up in the air made it feel a bit unfinished.  As I said first, I really got the impression the text just couldn't commit and was trying to be or do too many things at once.  

The writing was good and very readable.  I started the book and finished it very quickly, within a few days, and in only a few long reading sessions.  It caught my interest right from the beginning.  To be fair, I like stories like that: a group trapped in an isolated location where there's a killer.  I like mysteries, so that may have colored my expectations and may be why I was disappointed overall.  But in the beginning, it held my attention and I was racing through it.  The pace slowed down and the middle section of the book was a bit muddled and I stopped paying close attention because my interest was waning a little.  The ending felt abrupt, and while the book didn't feel unfinished, the ending felt very unpolished and I was left with the vague impression I was missing something.  Like "that's it?"

If you've read Lapena's other books (I haven't), then chances are you'll like this, and if you like mysteries or suspenseful books you might like this more than I did.  But honestly I can't really recommend it.  It wasn't bad, not at all, but it also didn't leave much of an impression.  

Have you read this?  Let me know what you thought!  Did I miss something?  Maybe my attention wandered so much in the middle that the ending was better than I gave it credit for and I just wasn't reading closely enough!