I wish I had realized earlier how much of a horror novel The Resting Place was. While the writing is absolutely incredible, I was so creeped out most of the time I just had to finish for myself to know how it ended.

Rounded up from a 3.5*

I thought it was well-written and definitely kept my attention throughout. The protagonist's facial blindness was a very nice touch that felt pretty unique to this book. It added an extra layer of mystery as to who the killer actually was. I will say that despite any unique traits, it was ultimately pretty predictable. I knew what the ending was going to be pretty early in. The characters were also pretty standard, following all the usual tropes for this whodunnit type of story. It wasn't groundbreaking, but I would still say it was worth the read.

Good but not as good as her previous book. The face blindness was a nice layer of the story though; I really like the unexpected depth it gave the story.

I really loved the atmosphere in this novel. Our main character is very unreliable because not only does she have face blindness, she also suffers from anxiety. I usually don’t love when a character’s mental health is used against them and no one believes them, but this time I thought it was well done. Eleanor recognizes her illness may be affecting her thoughts but doesn’t let it hinder her.
Set in a creepy old house in the woods in a blizzard, this locked room mystery will keep you guessing!

DNF at 15%...

This book felt so extremely chaotic with waaay too many characters! Definitely took away from my ability to follow storyline therefore I DNF'd.

Camilla Sten is quickly becoming one of my auto-buy authors. The Lost Village has lived rent-free in my head since I read it, and so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to read The Resting Place. Yet another atmospheric, creepy read set in a remote location, this time with a fun twist - the main character has prosopagnosia, which means she can't remember the face of the person who killed her grandmother. I really enjoyed this read and definitely can't wait to see more of what Ms. Sten has to offer :)

▪️ The Resting Place by Camilla Sten
rating: 3 ⭐️
format: physical/digital arc, audiobook
length: 328 pages/8hr 51min
pub day: march 29, 2022

I actually started the physical copy of TRP last year but ended up dnfing it. I thought I would try again last month after seeing some good reviews. I ended up bouncing back and forth between the physical copy and audiobook, but I think I enjoyed the audio better overall. The concept of prosopagnosia was really interesting to me as I had never heard of this prior to this book. This was multi timeline, but I found the past tense more interesting than the present. The pacing for the first half was slow, but it did pick up for the second half. I enjoyed TRP, but it was nothing special for me and not very memorable.

Thank you to @netgalley for my digital arc, @minotaur_books for my physical arc, and @scribd for the audio !

First let me start by saying I read this quite a while ago and forgot to post a review. This review is based on what I remember of the book. Though I did star rate it at the time of finishing. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

A twisty, claustrophobic thriller.

I've become such a fan of Sten's since reading her last book, The Lost Village. So I knew I had to read this one. While I didn't love it quite as much as her last book, it was still very good.

A creepy old house, a journal full of past secrets, face blindness, murder, missing people, being snowed in with no way to Contact anyone for help.... all things you can expect from this one.

It was an interesting read, especially with the prosopagnosia (face blindness) involved. Having the MC have such a unique characteristic added so much to the story. Her grandmother was murdered, she saw the murderer, but couldn't see their face 😱 that in itself is scary enough

But also the atmousphere played such a huge role in the storytelling. I loved the snowy, claustrophobic feel of this one. Especially when you add in all of the above.

I always love a story that has some history to it. In this one you get it through diary entries which help lay out the story and help you understand how things have played out.

I will definitely be reading anything this author some out with.

* Thanks to netgalley and publisher for a gifted copy

This was a highly-anticipated book. I enjoyed it and plan to read more by this author. Thank you to the author and publisher for my copy in exchange for a review.

I officially have a new favorite thriller/horror author and I'm so excited! I loved The Last Village and this book was just as good!

Eleanor suffers from prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a person's face, even if it's her own family or closest friend. When she walks in on the murder of her Grandmother Vivianne she comes face to face with the killer, a killer that she can't identify thanks to her face blindness. Every day that passes after the murder Eleanor worries grow bigger, she worries about the killer never being identified and them potentially coming after her next. Then to her surprise she finds out that Vivianne left her a house in the Swedish woods where her Grandfather passed away. Eleanor's boyfriend Sebastian and her Aunt Veronika move in with her to this house of secrets but they will soon regret ever stepping foot in the house.

The amount of times my Apple Watch yelled at me during reading this book for my high heart rate is incredible, I've never had that happen to me before. I knew I loved her first book but wow, I wasn't prepared for how much I would enjoy this one. It was twisty, dark, and left me anxious if I'm being completely honest. The amount of family secrets in this book blew my mind and I loved how unique all of the characters were.

If you're looking for a gothic, atmospheric book please consider picking this up, you won't be disappointed.

Thanks to St. Martins Press, Minotaur Books for the copy for my review.

A great read by this author. I definitely recommend checking this one out!
Thank you NetGalley for providing a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Camilla Sten’s last novel The Lost Village was the worst book I had read in a long time, so when I saw that she had a new novel coming out, I knew she deserved another chance. The good new is that The Resting Place is markedly better than The Lost Village. The bad news is that this does not really mean much.

Eleanor has prosopagnosia, a condition where she cannot recognize faces. When her grandmother is killed, she bumps into the killer but she cannot recognize them. A few months later, she learns that she has inherited an estate in the Swedish woods. Eleanor goes with her boyfriend Sebastian, her aunt Veronika, and the lawyer to straighten out the state affairs. The family mysteries start to come into the open and the killer is revealed.

This is better than her last novel but it is still not great. The characters are uninteresting, the tension is not high, the reveals are not surprising, and the only thing that really carries this novel is the setting. They are in a house in the middle of a blizzard, and I am a fan of books where the natural elements are just as dangerous as the people sheltering themselves from them. Even still this setting does not do enough to carry The Resting Place past the point of being a mediocre, pretty generic thriller. The plot is pretty bland but it does not help that the writing is just boring. I do not know if it is the fault of the writer or the translator, but so much of the writing is cliché and poor that it is difficult to stay focused. The most interesting aspect, Elanor having prosopagnosia, is used more as a plot device than something that seriously affects the plot. Eleanor is staying in a house where her boyfriend is really the only person she is close to. She seems very aware of who is who all of time, except for when it is good for the story. I would like someone with prosopagnosia to read this and tell whether or not this is a good representation. My guess would be no. 

I do not plan to read any more of Camilla Sten’s novels for a while. These two have done nothing for me, and there is nothing in her writing that has held my interest to continue to read her works. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange  for an honest review.

The Resting Place was a struggle for me. It took me longer to get through this one, and just didn’t give me the wow factor that i look for in a thriller.

After The Lost Village, I knew I could expect immaculate tension and edge-of-my-seat unanswered questions from Sten, and she didn't disappoint. One of my favorite features of her books is that there are so many questions that need answering, and she is par for the course on holding out some of the juiciest bits until the end, keeping you hooked the entire way.

While I wasn't overly attached to Eleanor as a narrator, her prosopagnosia is an incredible tool for maximizing the tension in The Resting Place. Sten has a knack for creating (at least in my view) some distinctly annoying or dislikeable characters but placing them in a storyline you just can't put down.

Also worth applauding is Sten's skill at crafting settings for her novels that feel both true to the thriller genre and the likes of Agatha Christie will also staying edgy enough to be just the slightest bit unpredictable, and this held true for Solhoga. Giving Solhoga a backstory bolstered by the dual narrative helps it feel like a character all on its own.

Many thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press in addition to the author for this ARC. This is my unbiased and honest review.
#NetGalley #TheRestingPlace #St.MartinsPress #CamillaSten

This one was a touch more difficult than Ms. Sten’s earlier books. I tried to go in blind but, honestly, I was expecting more of a haunted house book. Eleanor has had a tough life. She suffers from a condition called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. Basically, she can’t tell one face from another. This poses a bigger problem than normal when she sees the person who murdered her grandmother running from the scene of the crime. Her grandmother leaves her a creepy old house in Sweden. She, her lawyer, her mother’s awful sister, and her boyfriend go to check out the mansion that Eleanor is just now learning exists. It has all the makings of being an awesome haunted house story.
Honestly, I struggled with this one. The writing is superb. Ms. Sten does a great job with the atmosphere. I’m still a fan. This one lacked a key element for me and that is characters. I really didn’t care about any of them. Eleanor was the most interesting of them but even she could have been better established. I really wanted more supernatural content and less drama.
All that being said, I’m still glad I read this. I love the writing style. This is a decent thriller but shouldn’t be billed as horror.

THE RESTING PLACE is another winner from Sten. It is dark and twisty with all chills I wanted from a book like this. The tension and overall suspense level were so high that it makes the reader compulsively keep reading. Or maybe just me? Anyway...this novel completely brought me down the rabbit hole as it quite frankly scared me a little too.

An atmospheric, suspenseful novel told in two timelines. It has all the usual elements of a creepy gothic tale . . . a dead grandmother, an isolated old mansion, a missing grounds keeper, severe snowstorm, power outage, false identities, murders, orphans, and deeply buried family secrets. I enjoyed the story with several surprising twists, and the characters were well fleshed out. The prosopagnosia (face blindness) condition of the main character added an interesting element.

Camilla Sten has done it again! #therestingplace is a twisted, convoluted, grab-you-by-the-throat triller with so many twists and turns you’ll get dizzy. But you won’t be able to stop reading because you’ll want to know what happens next until you get to the very end. I thank #netgalley and the publisher for this arc to read and review—all opinions are my own.

I've known someone with prosopagnosia well, and for a lot longer than I have known the word or the condition existed. It's one of the reasons I was really eager to get this book's DRC and devour it. I was so happy to see this under-represented and misunderstood disability represented at all. I hoped, of course, to see it represented well.

It was. The condition of "face-blindness" was truly well established, in a complex and multivalent way; it was also chillingly effectively woven into a deeply unsettling, even unnerving, plot.
<blockquote>Prosopagnosia, face blindness. It means my brain doesn’t process human faces the same way others’ do. I can’t recognize faces, so have to memorize distinguishing features instead.</blockquote>
What happens, as you've seen in the book description, is a scene of brutal violence that simply can't be forgotten by anyone who's experienced anything remotely close to it. But, in Eleanor's case, it's a scene that lacks a very important resonance. She's seen a murder, and a murderer, and she can't forget it but can't process it, can't help assign guilt to the guilty because she is biomechanically incapable of the necessary function. And then what happens? She inherits the house her grandmother failed to tell her that she owned. Way to lard the stress into the liver of the story...another set of unknown people, faces ever unknown to her and markers to somehow fasten onto their identities.

From that point on, I was so very sold on this read. I could not WAIT to see how this awful psychological double bind would resolve.

The things I liked were, like the things I liked in The Lost Village, the ones that brought the character to life:
<blockquote>...it’s the body that panics first, the brain that follows. If I can just keep my breaths slow and force myself to relax then I can trick my mind into calm.
–and–
“Your fear is valid, but that doesn’t make it real. The fear may be true, but it doesn’t have to be your truth.”</blockquote>
They're present, they're satisfyingly numerous, but in the end the thing that will make or break the read is one's response to the ending. The entire book is a set-up to the set-piece in the last, say, thirtyish pages. It's a big ask from a sophmore novelist. I was rewarded by it because its resolution was so very timely and so personal to me. I can't say more because the Spoiler Stasi will descend on me with malice and fury. This post will clue you in to the direction we're heading if you care to be enlightened.

I thought the use of a big, old, dark manor house in the country was going to be a silly distraction, a gewgaw meant to distract me from something...it wasn't, and it was; the big winter storm, another gothic-storytelling staple, was similarly used. These weren't my favorite moments in the book. I will say they didn't "ruin" my experience of the story as can happen with such inessentials. The nature of the story is so basically well-crafted that Author Sten could've chosen any one of an array of settings and accomplished her task.

I confess that, as I read along and Eleanor kept doing her Eleanor thing, I was half-dreading the need to slap an "ableism" content warning on the review. I was so relieved that I did not feel Author Sten had crossed my own mental threshhold for use of a disability shading into the old, dark "crippled" territory I've still been hit with in the twenty-first century.

I'm going to leave the last words to Eleanor, via Author Sten. I think they say more about what I derived from this read than I can.
<blockquote>She says that wounds can leave scars on our souls just like on our bodies, and that we have to learn to live with them rather than try to rid ourselves of them completely.</blockquote>

🏚 This story is told from two perspectives and in two different time periods. Ultimately, the two timelines merged, and I thought it was done very well.

🏚 I wanted more in the story about the MC’s prosopagnosia (face-blindness). I felt like that was going to be a huge focus of the story based on the synopsis, but it wasn’t. It felt like a missed opportunity to have it be such a small part of the story.

🏚 I saw the ending coming a mile away – well, part of the ending anyway - but I think you were supposed to figure some of it out because there were simply too many clues. However, there was one little twist at the end that I didn’t see coming and I appreciated that.

🏚 The story definitely had some thrills and chills. There were tense situations, lots of things happening in the dark, a snowstorm, and of course the creepy old house itself. It was very atmospheric, claustrophobic, and had an awesome gothic feel to it.

🏚 I felt like this was a slow burn, but the buildup was perfect.

🏚 I enjoyed Sten’s previous book - The Lost Village – but I liked this one more. Anyone who enjoys atmospheric old houses, family secrets, and murder mysteries would likely enjoy this book.

Thank you @NetGalley and @StMartinsPress for an eARC of this book, which I have read and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.