Please Enjoy Your Stay

For 12 years, Mia has obsessed over the murder of her 17-year-old cousin, Tristan, at a notorious castle-turned-hotel in the Austrian Alps. Even though her eyewitness testimony convicted the hotel’s owner, Augustin Aiglar, the media implied that her aunt Iris, a best-selling true-crime author investigating a decades-old killing of an heiress at the castle, might have been involved. When Aiglar demands a retrial, a true-crime podcast reopens the case to prove his innocence. To protect her now reclusive aunt from more damaging lies, Mia goes undercover as a nanny for six-year-old Evie, the daughter of the castle’s new owner. But as she delves into the past, Mia uncovers secrets that mean she might have accused the wrong man. YA mystery author Goedjen (No Beauties or Monsters, The Breathless) makes her adult debut with an atmospheric, moody thriller laced with a touch of the Gothic and the supernatural. If some of the red herrings dropped throughout the text go nowhere, and if Mia is sometimes an irritating protagonist who recklessly exposes her young charge to danger as she seeks clues, Goedjen compensates with genuinely spooky scenes of suspense. A fast-paced read for fans of psychological thrillers.—Willy Williams