An Unwanted Guest

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.