The Resting Place by Camilla Sten is a locked-room mystery in which a woman is trapped in a remote country house in a blizzard with her grandmother’s killer. The only problem is the heroine has face blindness and doesn’t know from whom she should run.
The Resting Place
The Resting Place tackles a great idea: what happens when you witness a murder but have prosopagnosia or face blindness and can’t identify the killer?
Elenaor doesn’t recognize faces, so she memorizes markers. Raised by her abusive grandmother after her mother dies of cancer, Eleanor finally sets boundaries with the help of a therapist when she is older. Still, she struggles with relationships
And then her grandmother is murdered.
Eleanor is left a grand country home she’s heard nothing about, but that’s not the worst of it. The home carries a haunting neglected air even though it is clean. Perhaps it’s the result of the caretaker who is now strangely missing.
But when a blizzard descends on the small party that has gone to the house to settle the estate, there’s more than the weather they’ll need to worry about.
The Characters
I want to stand up and freaking cheer for Camilla Sten. I devoured her first book, The Lost Village, in one sitting. The one issue I had with that book was that the character development felt flat. HOWEVER, and this is a big point to make, these are translated books. I don’t know what is lost in translation, and I don’t know what doesn’t compute through cultures. So I completely dismissed it in Village because I knew the writing was good.
Then I read The Resting Place.
To see how Sten’s writing has grown and matured is a thing of beauty. These characters are ready to grab you by the throat, and you will need to hang on for their wild ride. Every single character in this multi-player cast shocked the heck out of me. I was prepared for twists in the plot, but the twists in the characters kept the pace quick, adding to the air of tension simmering through the whole book.
Atmosphere
The Lost Village was downright spooky, so I know Sten is adept at twisting the knob of tension. But The Resting Place was just unsettling enough to be unnerving. I loved it. The house looked completely normal, but then so did Eleanor’s grandmother. The setting served as a great representation of things not always being what they appear to be. Just absorbing what the characters thought and felt about the house left me as the reader slightly unsure. A fantastic way to ramp up the tension.
Final Thoughts
With this book, Camilla Sten has become an auto-buy author for me. I highly recommend both of her books. Be sure to check them out.
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