An Unwanted Guest

This book was a 2 stars read until the very end where a small plot twist made me smile and somewhat redeemed the slow, painful, and messy, character building.
None of the characters are likeable or particularly pleasant to read about and we get to spend A LOT of time with them, I would have most likely DNFed this book if I hadn't read Lapena's work before and therefore trusted her to give me an ending that I didn't predict. While I, in fact, did not foresee who did it the method by which the author got to this result this time wasn't very satisfying.

I finished this in one day, so it would seem that it should have 5 stars. But the characters are really just stock characters for the “group locked away” murder mystery. I wasn't expecting that. I think if I had expected that going into it, I would have liked it better.
Outside of the stock characters, I loved the setting and plot. I hadn't figured the answer out until late in the book. And the why was a mystery until I was told. There were hints, but I missed the early hints.
Good murder mystery in the vein of And Then There Were None or Murder on the Orient Express. But be prepared for stock characters.

4.25
One of my new favs!!! Finished it in a matter of hours and wow was it amazing!!!
It has everything I love in a thriller;
1)A snowy setting ✔️
2)Isolated ✔️
3)A cozy inn ✔️
4)Characters getting killed one by one ✔️
5)Fast paced ✔️
6)pov from all the characters in the book ✔️

The only reason I didn't give this a 5 star rating was number 1; the book was very short
number 2; the ending..unfortunately the ending fell a bit flat for me and it dragged quite a bit but overall a really enjoyable read and highly recommend this for a cold day:))

I liked this book, despite some of the reviews I would definitely recommend. It's a real whodunnit set in a claustrophobic, nowhere to go setting. It takes place at a hotel in the mountains during a huge snow storm that cuts off the electricity. The guests cannot leave during the storm and cannot call for help while the bodies start piling up. I didn't guess the killer till I was about 90 percent thru and that was only due to process of elimination. The reason I gave it 4 stars was because I felt the clues throughout the book could've been a little better or given the reader some idea of what the connection was.I felt the clues could have been presented better in a way the reader has that OMG moment when the killer is revealed but you don't really have that. Overall good book definitely recommend I liked it but I wanted to love it.

It was engrossing, as it should be, with the usual myriad of lives put together by accident in a hotel and snowed in. But I don't much care for endings that bring completely unknown factors such as somebody who knew somebody else and had a secret on them and you could only know about it reading that exact page. It seems a bit sloppy, as if the author didn't know a way of untying the mystery and that page had been inserted there.

A bit of a disappointment from Shari Lapena. I had read The Couple Next Door and A Stranger in The House before this, so I had high expectations.
The first bad sign for me was that it follows a similar storyline that has been recycled many times since Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (one of my favourite books of all times). After reading that one, others with the similar storyline were usually a let down, but I hoped that because it's a Lapena book, I would feel differently.


For me, there are two types of mystery books. The type where the author gives you 95 percent of relevant clues, you can't put them together, then at the big reveal in the end you are shocked that you didn't put together all the obvious clues given to you. This describes the vast majority of Agatha Christie books (and The Couple Next Door) and I think that is one of the reasons she was so successful, because she did not hide a lot of relevant information from readers.
The second type is when the author purposefully leaves out large bits of relevant information, that if the reader had known, they would've solved the mystery instantly.
Of course, authors obviously are not supposed to reveal everything to readers, mystery or not. But sometimes such a great deal is hidden from readers that it feels a bit lazy on the author's part, and immediately the big reveal is made, the first thing the reader thinks is “if I had know that one piece of crucial information, I would've solved it immediately”.

The second instance is exactly what happened with this book. The reader is informed out of nowhere of a piece of information that, if we had known since, we easily could've guessed who committed the first murder, and then the rest from there.

Apart from this, the book was intriguing enough and entertaining, but the ending was so disappointing in that it came out of nowhere, that it soured my opinion of the whole book.

If this was another author, I would not read her work again. However, because I've read her other books and I know how great they are, I will actively await her next one and hope it is better than this.

Nine people have plans to spend the weekend at a secluded inn up in the Catskills. A snowstorm rolls in and they are more isolated than they hoped for, and on the morning one of the guests are found dead at the bottom of the stairs, but was it really an accident?

I’m a sucker for the snowed in trope.

A quick read, feels a little like fast food in book form. You finish it fast but you don’t feel full or nourished.

Story uses several POVs and feels like a story told before, doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

SPOILER: I found it so funny how they left the body at the bottom of the stairs and walked around it. Reminded me of Clue or similar movies, it was great.