2/5 Stars What sounds better than a cozy murder mystery set in a secluded Catskill lodge? This book was set up to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller that you stay up all night reading. The actual book? Not so much. While I may disagree with many aspects of this book, I do want to mention two good things that stood out to me. First, Lapena does an exceptional job of creating a character-driven plot. Second, the back-cover blurb did a fantastic job of reeling me in. Unfortunately, that alone couldn’t make me love this book. Here’s the book blurb for those who want to find out for themselves.
An Unwanted Guest was a one-sitting read for me. I managed to quickly read through it in half a day. I didn’t appreciate how the lack of plot in this murder mystery pushed me forward so quickly. While it does fall under a murder mystery genre, Lapena gives nothing for readers to guess who did it. Instead, Lapena opted to put all that information in a quick five to six pages at the very end of the book, making me feel as if I had wasted the previous three to four hours reading the previous sections of the book. I am a sucker for good character development. I wanted to relate or fall in love with any of these characters. But instead, they lacked both depth and lovability. Lapena does a fantastic job of making the reader hate her characters without even giving the development to help readers understand why characters are the way they are. Lapena makes you hate the characters by introducing events or beliefs that either make no sense or are horrifying. A lesbian character has no family because of her sexuality, another character wants to kill their wife because she inconvenienced them while they cheated on her, and another blames everything on a midlife crisis. All of these could be fantastic character development points, but instead, they are just dropped in as a filler. Other issues include mentioning things but not continuing them, and sometimes their inclusion makes no sense. Early in the book, Lapena describes a bar in the lodge only to add the sentence “This was a man’s room” and move on to a completely different topic. Never mentions that room again or why a random bar in the lodge needed to be labeled a “man’s room” even though she makes all of the characters drink almost ceaselessly throughout the novel. Another theme I didn’t appreciate was the rampant references to Agatha Christie in almost every chapter. There was so much blunt foreshadowing that it felt like she wanted the reader to discover they were reading a murder mystery more than she wanted us to figure out who did it. As always, I recommend you read this book for yourselves and judge how you feel about it. This book might be a good choice for some but not for others. That is up to the reader to decide. It can be found at Audible, Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and wherever else you get your books. New blog posts every Tuesday and Thursday.
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AuthorSkyler Smith is an avid reader when she isn't adventuring and traveling with her partner and husky dog Anna. She loves all things Fiction, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, and occasionally enjoys Romance. While currently in pursuit of an Associate of the Arts, she hopes to become an author in the future. In the meantime, she enjoys writing reviews of books that she has read and short stories. ArchivesCategories |