Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press & Minotaur Books, and Camilla Sten for the advanced copy of The Resting Place in exchange for my honest review.

I seem to be in the vast minority here, but this one just didn't really work for me. I'm sincerely hoping this prosopagnosia "trope" isn't going to be the new thing to take the thriller world by storm, because after reading two (maybe three? my memory is bad) books with the protagonist having this disorder, I'm kind of over it. I predicted one of the story's bigger twists quite early on, and the reveal of the grandmother's killer was only so-so for me. It's possible that due to my overwhelming propensity for thrillers, this felt run-of-the-mill for me, while it is almost universally enjoyed by others.

The writing was solid, and there's no doubt Sten is a talented author. I definitely won't hesitate to read anything else by her in the future.

The Resting Place is on bookshelves in the US March 29!

Initially when I got to know that main character Eleanor has prosopagnosia- the inability to recognize the face, I felt it would not interest me expecting the whole plot to be around this concept. But it was an atmospheric plot with everyone coming to a creepy mansion during a snow blizzard. As they piece together the history of this mysterious place that Eleanor inherits after her grandmother' brutal murder, they find more twists with the family history. The grandmother, Vivienne who rose up in her life from being a simple Polish girl has many secrets buried in this estate. I did see the twist coming at the end but it still held my interest. The dual timelines was interesting as they were fleshed out and separate yet interlinked.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

During a routine visit, Eleanor finds her grandmother dead and witnesses the murderer fleeing. A simple plot…except for the fact that Eleanor suffers from face blindness.

With the murderer at large, she becomes greatly anxious, her senses reeling. To exacerbate these feelings, she finds out that she has been left an ancestral home deep in the Swedish woods, a home she knew nothing about. With her boyfriend, aunt, and lawyer in tow, Eleanor prepares for a simple weekend of taking inventory and learning more about her family history. Unfortunately, sometimes even in the easiest of endeavors, we get much more than we bargained for. This is a lesson Eleanor is on the way to finding out.

An atmospheric, nail biter of a read that starts with a slow burn and crescendos into a bonfire.

Run not walk to your local bookstore upon its release: March 29, 2022

Thank you to @NetGalley @StMartinsPress @WednesdaySten for the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a story of mayhem…the main character has such anxiety…what does she really know about anyone? The story moves slowly, and it is tragic at times…I did not love this book, but others might…

Overall, it was just okay.
The writing is atmospheric and Sten obviously knows how to set a tone. As the group is trapped in this creepy house during blizzard, you can feel the tension. However, despite Sten's obvious writing skill, the story itself felt stretched. As if there wasn't really enough to hold it together. Honestly, I feel like it would have probably made a better short story.
The story does a good job of hooking you in right from the beginning. Eleanor witnesses her grandmother's death but can't identify the killer because she suffers from prosopagnosia. But then, the story starts to slow down after that. Unfortunately, that slow burn in the middle section didn't really pay off with the final showdown/twist reveals. One twist might have been an easy guess, but still decent storytelling. The other was a surprise and not so much a surprise like, "Oh, that's shocking", but more just, "Oh, okay then". In that, it was a bit disappointing after such a strong start with strong writing.
There was good character development with Eleanor as she tries to control the situation and leave the echoes of her demeaning grandmother behind. The background characters are just that, in the background. Interesting but not much to them. Which works for the story because it's more about Eleanor and the mystery of the house/her family. I do wish that Eleanor's prosopagnosia was utilized more. I think it would have added to the story in a positive way rather than just being used as an afterthought.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 ⭐️

The book captured my interest right away, with Eleanor being witness to her grandmothers death but suffers from prosopagnosia (face blindness) so she couldn’t recognize who the killer was when they fled past her.

There are two POVs, the chapters go back and forth between present day, Eleanor and year 1965, diary entries from Annushka, the maid. I throughly enjoyed this aspect of the book because it definitely helps building up the suspense to the family secrets that were meant to stay buried.

The middle of the book though was a slow burn, which was a little disappointing with how it started. But, I enjoyed the characters and the ending was good! It didn’t leave me in shock, but still done very well.

Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur books for proving me with this e-arc in exchange for my honest review.

I love this author and was very excited to read this latest work. This was such a perfect thriller. It's creepy, mysterious, unpredictable, and definitely kept me on the edge of my seat! Would recommend.

Eleanor has prosopagnosia- the inability to recognize the face of someone you know.
When her cruel grandmother is murdered, she sees the killer. But the face mean nothing to her, as she cannot recognize them.
When she learns her grandmother has left her an estate in the woods, the secrets they find there may help to unravel the dark past

Although the plots are different, the structure of "The Resting Place" is similar to Sten's earlier book "The Lost Village" (2021) with strong visual images that suggest this also would make a good, scary movie. Told in the first person in the present and interspersed with a voice from the past as the secrets are revealed. Another well-done translation from the Swedish by Alexandra Fleming.

FIRST SENTENCE: "The light in the small room is cold, the stark, white glare of an eco-friendly bulb."

THE STORY: Eleanor saw her grandmother Vivianne's murderer. She thinks she should know who it was but she suffers from prosopagnosia or face blindness. Using unique facial features she can recognize people but it's easy enough to conceal one's identity. Fixating on the fear that the murderer could be anyone and anywhere, Eleanor is full of anxiety which is intensified when a lawyer calls to tell her that Vivianne has left her the large Victorian summer home that has been abandoned for years. Wanting to learn her family's secrets, Eleanor, her boyfriend Sebastian, her cousin Veronika, and the lawyer head to the remote location to begin an inventory of the house.

In the beginning when odd things happen, it is easy for them to be dismissed, but Eleanor suspects they are not alone. Is she right or still emotional since the death of her grandmother?

WHAT I THOUGHT: This is a "stay up late to finish" kind of story. The author has mastered the art of ending each chapter with a hook to make the reader turn just one more page. The creepy atmosphere keeps everything slightly off-kilter.The writing is fine and the characters are interesting, but the relationships and the true identities of the people are confusing. It wasn't until I was halfway through that I began to understand who was who; because although there aren't a lot of characters, the women all had two names with one starting with "V": Victoria, Vivianne, Veronika. The ending felt rushed and a bit contrived.

BOTTOM LINE: HIGHLYRECOMMENDED for suspense and thriller readers.

DISCLAIMER: Thank you to NetGalley / Minotaur St. Martin's Press, and the author for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Eleanor is with her boyfriend Sebastian in the Swedish countryside to inventory her late grandmother’s estate. A grandmother who was abusive and cruel, In a home she didn’t know Vivianne had owned. With the lawyer and an estranged aunt to help, Eleanor soon uncovers more of a past she knew nothing about… and as violence unfolds around them, she realizes her grandmother’s murderer may be on the property with them! Full of twists and turns, I loved many of the elements of this story by Camilla Sten. If you are a fan of secret diaries and hidden pasts, you will enjoy The Resting Place. I received an ARC of this book, all opinions are my own..

Eleanor lives with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a familiar person's face. It causes stress. Acute anxiety.

It can make you question what you think you know.

When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, the horror of having come so close to a murderer—and not knowing if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality.

Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a chilling past for over fifty years.

Eleanor. Her steadfast boyfriend, Sebastian. Her reckless aunt, Veronika. The lawyer. All will go to this house of secrets, looking for answers. But as they get closer to uncovering the truth, they’ll wish they had never come to disturb what rests there.

I really enjoyed reading "The Resting Place." Although the book started out a little bit slow, it did start to speed up and things got more and more interesting once the diary was found. I appreciated the views of two different storylines wrapping up into one in the end. I appreciated the explanation and coverage of prosopagnosia, as I had never heard of this before. The twist was incredible and really made sense with how rotten Vivianne was a person, knowing more of what she dealt with.

The Lost Village was one of my favourite books of 2020, and The Resting Place completely lived up to my expectations! It wasn't a formulaic thriller; it was fresh, exciting, and unexpected, with fabulously unreliable narration. I couldn't put it down! I cannot wait to see what Sten writes next, she is becoming a fast favourite for a satisfying, twisty, and un=put-downable read!

So much better than The Lost Village, in my opinion!!

We follow Eleanor who has inherited her grandmother secret estate after her murder. We travel to the estate and shortly start uncovering long buried family secrets. The atmosphere was absolutely top notch. We are confined to the estate for the entire story, both in the present and in the past via diary entries. The past entries span quite a length of time while the present timeline takes place over the course of a few days.

Eleanor is understandably paranoid after witnessing her grandmothers murder, so being in her head really ups the anxiety of the reader and the snow storms and inclement weather add to the feeling of dread.

I absolutely loved uncovering the family secrets and thought the author did a great job of revealing everything!!

ARC copy received via Netgalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

⭐⭐⭐.3.Stars

The “V” Characters:
Grandmother ~ Vivianne
Two Daughters ~ Vendela and Veronika
Granddaughter Victoria Eleanor

However, Victoria prefers to be called by her middle name Eleanor.

Eleanor suffers from ‘face blindness’ medical term is prosopagnosia. She cannot remember people’s face no matter how familiar; she will memorize some distinguishing feature so that there is something familiar.

She has lived with her Grandmother Vivianne ~ who much prefers to be called Vivianne than Grand Mother for sixteen years and really thinks of her as her mother. She often visits Vivianne sometimes for dinner sometimes just for a visit. When she arrives and knocks on the door, someone NOT her grandmother opens the door and rushes out past her. When she enters she finds she had been attacked and stabbed with scissors and is dying on the kitchen floor.
Although Eleanor saw the same she has no recognition and cannot identify the person.

Authorities believe it was a robbery gone wrong and have closed the case. Meanwhile, Eleanor finds out that her grandmother Vivianne has specified her in her will the owner of Solhoga her abandoned estate.

Story is told in two time periods by two narrators
Eleanor present day and
Agnuska back in 1960 ~ she was the maid at Solhoga, the abandoned estate.

This is my second Camilla Sten novel. I am on the fence with my rating ~ Her stories seem like something I would love but I am not there just yet ~ thus the reason for my 3.3 stars!

I have read several novels by Swedish authors and have to admit their mystery/thriller writing style is a bit of getting used to!
Note: I loved Jo Nesbo’s “The Snowman” as well as Camilla Lackberg’s “The Drowning”. However, I am one of the few mystery fans that didn’t love Stieg Larsson’s novels.
I Love Fredrick Backman and his great stories!

Want to thank NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press ~ Minotaur Books for this eGalley. This file has been made available to me before publication in an early form for an honest professional review.
Publishing Release Date scheduled for March 29, 2022.

What's in a name? An age-old question, perhaps, but no less impactful for the passage of time. The answer could be anything, if you were willing to go deep enough in an explanation. In Camilla Sten's The Resting Place, translated by Alexandra Fleming, the answer is power. Power, security, and secrets. So many of each, in fact, that in other hands they might have gotten lost in the weeds and forgotten along the way. In Sten's capable hands, we are given a constantly shifting, intricately crafted narrative that relies just as much on keeping its secrets as it does on revealing them.

I had the good fortune to review Sten's prior novel, The Lost Village, last year, so when I heard she was so soon after putting out another work I knew I would be in for a ride. What I didn't expect is that it would center around a protagonist with a seldom engaged with disability - prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces - who, after walking in on the horrific scene of her grandmother's murder and being left to deal with her estate, dedicates herself to discovering the identity of the killer while uncovering decades worth of secrets in her grandmother's Swedish summer house.

Face blindness as a plot device seems both wholly original and criminally underused in the horror genre. I am by no means calling for it to become anything close to a trope - men and authority figures in the genre already don't believe women when they do have names and faces to go by, and gaslighting women into madness is already enough of a trope of its own - but seeing it in the protagonist of a novel was a refreshingly original approach. So often the monsters are faceless and cast into anonymity by their own choice; what happens when the facelessness is accidental? Naturally, to us and to Eleanor, everyone becomes a suspect.

It is a credit to Sten's ability that the suspense of each reveal in the novel is kept tight to the chest, but perhaps more important even than that continually building sense of dread is the construction of Eleanor herself as a strong character not in spite of but rather alongside her prosopagnosia. She is constantly placed in situations where her anxiety should take the forefront, and yet she trusts herself enough to know and use the tools she has at her disposal to assuage her own fear, even when those around her try to cast doubt on her assertions as a way to settle their own nerves. She allows herself moments of vulnerability but refuses to be continually treated like some breakable object because of her disability. Naturally, I adore her all the more for it.

The Resting Place is, at its heart, somewhere between a ghost story (of sorts), a murder mystery, and a labyrinthine family history. While we're never spinning enough around the narratives turns to get fully lost, they are paced well enough to put us in just as precarious a position for trust as Eleanor herself. It's never so much that Eleanor is an unreliable narrator - the novel alternates between her in the present and a young woman named Anushka in the 1960s - but that the narrative path and the intricately crafted characters come together to create an atmosphere of constant unease.

As we wander the halls of the deceased Vivianne's summer home, the very air of the place takes on a sense of smothering secrecy, not to mention the mysteriously papered over doorway…and whether she wants to or not, Eleanor is compelled to bring those secrets to light. The Resting Place propels readers along in a cleverly convoluted mystery that asks and offers an answer to how much we can truly trust what we see, even when we do remember it. And how much truth is in one person's memory?

The Resting Place will be released on March 29, 2022 from Minotaur Press, an imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I love the Lost Village, and I loved The Resting Place!
At first, it seemed to move a little slow and in the usual "girl inherits haunted house" format, but it amped up quickly and I was not disappointed. I read it quickly, enjoyed the plot and character development.
Great mystery read!

Not only was I initially intrigued by the cover and the brief blurb, but I was also curious about the kind of book an internationally admired author would write. I have to admit, I am now hooked and can't wait to read more by this author.
Camilla Sten really knows how to carefully put together all the details that made this story so atmospheric and stuffed the scenes with less than perfect characters leading slowly to more and more suspenseful scenes. From the first pages I could sense a feeling that things were going to go from bad to worse.

I also liked that the conclusion fit with the rest of the story. I definitely think this book deserves 5 stars.

The Resting Place by Camilla Sten
Expected Pub Date: 3/29/22

This story was full of mystery. It has extremely short chapters and because of that, I was able to breeze right through it. The prosopagnosia plot has been used more and more lately it seems. I don't always vibe with them, but I enjoyed this one.

It's a wintry atmospheric story which was nice to read over the winter. It's a shame this doesn't come out until early springtime. I know not all readers are seasonal, but I am.

One thing I wasn't a huge fan of was the names that the author chose for the characters. Man, I had an awful time keeping track because we have 3 very crucial ones...Victoria, Vivianne, and Veronika. Victoria goes by Eleanor but every so often she is referenced as Victoria.
It was a struggle for me to get in line from the very start. I had to jot down and refer back to them. My book was also filled with tabs! I have never been more thankful that this book was sent to me with a notebook! It helped a great deal.

I did call the ending early and the "who dun it" (which I'm very proud of!) but that didn't take anything away from how I felt when everything wrapped up. All in all, I liked it.

Many thanks to @minotaur_books & @netgalley for the ARC/eARC!

Eleanor was raised by her grandmother Vivienne, a cold dominating woman, following her mother's loss. An awkward child Eleanor suffers from face blindness making social interactions difficult. One Sunday she arrives for their regular lunch date and encounters Vivienne's killer. With the reading of the will she discovers a country estate previously unknown to her. She, her supportive boyfriend, and her aunt Veronika arrive to help the lawyer take stock. During the night a blizzard strands them and ominous events and sightings begin. Eleanor is convinced they are not alone . The author's prose builds a tense atmosphere of foreboding turning this literary trope into an immersive story. Eleanor is a very unusual protagonist and I was frantic to discover the answers right beside her.. This solid Scandinavian noir thriller is infused with family secrets, loss and betrayal as the sins of the past taint the future. I immediately searched out the author's first book and . will be recommending this book to friends and family.