The Resting Place

By: Camilla Sten, Alexandra Fleming - translator

Narrated by: Angela Dawe

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"Engrossing, character-rich, powerful. Sten is on a roll."—Publishers Weekly(starred review)

Crimson Peak meets The Sanatorium in The Resting Place, a heart-thumping, unforgettable novel of horror and suspense by international sensation Camilla Sten.

Deep rooted secrets.
A twisted family history.
And a house that will never let go.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Minotaur Books.

©2022 Camilla Sten and Alexandra Fleming (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Plot holes the size of a car (SPOILERS AHEAD)

CW: This book contains at least one graphic depiction of death by suicide and deals poorly with mental health issues in general and also by stigmatizing those who die by suicide

This was the second book I’ve read by this author (the first was The Lost Village) and I was so disappointed in both. Camilla Sten can write an exceptional atmosphere and decent characters. And this story seemed to hold promise where the plot was concerned as well—it had a murder, a summons to an isolated (albeit very Lost-Village-esque) sprawling property with secrets tucked away to be discovered. There were moments of suspense and tension, (SPOILER) flashbacks between the past and present via the discovery by the main character of a diary. But all the ways the plot seemed to be carefully crafted unraveled as Sten began ignoring both her own narrative and basic reality.

(SPOILERS) Cell phones worked until they just didn’t. (Later in the story battery life became an issue but not during crucial moments when Sten just decides the cell phone arbitrarily has no signal.) Characters’ behavior was erratic and nonsensical (also an issue in Lost Village). And during one of the clench points of the plot (SPOILER) some of the characters were trying to urgently escape and all that stood between them and freedom was . . . a car with its door open that was blocking the icy road. I was literally screaming at the book, “THE DOOR IS OPEN, PUT THE DAMN THING IN NEUTRAL AND PUSH!” Sten could have chosen a fallen tree, but she chose one of the easiest obstacles to move in an emergency and it completely flummoxed the characters.

The denouement of the book failed to let us know what happened to two of the significant characters. Also, remember the diary? That useful little discovery that could help clear so many things up if actually shared with anyone else? (SPOILER) The main character never divulges that she found it useful or even bothers to hold onto it. And it quite literally is the key to the entire conflict center of the entire book. But at the end, nope, what diary? Who said anything about a diary? It’s like Sten forgot that she let her main character discover it in the first place.

I so wanted this book to be well constructed. It had the potential. The bones of the story were good. It just needed the author to pay attention to the little details she had written for us and use them to plug in the various plot holes she inexplicably left in order to form a more complete story.

And for god’s sake, a dead car with an open door is not an insurmountable obstacle.