Reviews with content warning for Infertility - The Resting Place

Y’all! I am SHOOK. I know this one has mixed reviews, but it’s one of the best thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It’s a slow build but the chapters are short so it’s easily binged. The writing was done so well that over the course of the book the dread, anxiety, and fear really build. Y’all… it was super creepy. I couldn’t bring myself to read this too close to bedtime😅. But at the same time I didn’t want to put the book down because I HAD to know how it ended. I just knew the ended was going to be IT.

Now here’s where it lost a star for me. While the ending is a good, solid one, I didn’t have that lingering spooky feeling that I look for with a good thriller.

Overall, this was a good one and I definitely recommend it for spooky season 👻. Also, if you enjoyed Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney, definitely check this one out!

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paronomaniac's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Overall, this is a decent psychological mystery but I found the first half of the book dragged. The second half really picked up but I’m still not sure if the payoff is worth a drawn-out beginning.

There is also the possibility that some tension or atmosphere was lost when the book was translated to English.

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nrogers_1030's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

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tamara_joy's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

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soobooksalot's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The Resting Place is built on the fear from not being able to identify what's right in front of you.
Thank you to St. Martin's Press and Minotaur Books for my gifted copy for review!
Eleanor's grandmother Vivianne was murdered, and Eleanor saw who did it. However, she has a condition called prosopagnosia, which means she cannot process the visual information of faces, thus people are unrecognizable to her.
Months later, she's been called to the Swedish countryside to a property known as Solhöga to evaluate for the will.
There, Eleanor remains haunted by the knowledge that Vivianne's killer is out there, and knows what she saw.
Solhöga acts as a character of sorts, pulling us in to it's atmosphere and secrets. I truly enjoy books with such a setting to establish unease - I could have used even more detail about the house itself.
Two timelines give us the suspense of Eleanor's present, with the story of Anushka from the mid-60s.
The Resting Place is a slow burn that works it's magic for some truly great reveals. Trust nothing here!
Author Camilla Sten's second book has hooked me as a fan - recommended!
For release on March 29.

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thrillofthepage's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Sten’s 2021 release, The Lost Village, was a great read with a creepy atmosphere and dual timelines that were impeccably crafted. The Resting Place also created a spooky atmosphere with the isolated Solhöga mansion in the Swedish woods. The house itself gave me goosebumps because of its dark and mysterious history. It was the perfect backdrop for sinister events to unfold and Sten described it with just enough detail and left the rest to the reader’s imagination.

Our MC, Eleanor, suffers from prosopagnosia, which is better known as face blindness. This condition added an ominous feel to an already disturbing experience for Eleanor because she’s unable to identify who killed her grandmother. This causes severe anxiety for our protagonist, which leads us to doubt what she claims to see at Solhöga.

I loved the dual timelines and multi-POVs in this book. It was interesting to see the past revealed alongside the present period. I honestly didn’t guess the culprit and that made this a winning read!

As I said in my stories last week, this book is similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney. The MCs each had face blindness and were in wintry, remote locations. However, The Resting Place had a more propulsive plot that had me rapidly turning pages.

Thanks to Minotaur for my advanced copy. All opinions are my own.

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