Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen: A Gothic thriller that doesn’t quite check in

Tara Goedjen’s Please Enjoy Your Stay is an atmospheric thriller that combines a secluded Austrian castle, a decade-old murder, toxic family secrets, a true crime podcast, and just enough actual ghostly activity to give its familiar mystery a gothic edge.

When Mia was a teenager, her cousin was murdered while the family was staying at a notorious castle in the Austrian Alps. Mia was the only witness, and her testimony helped put the killer behind bars, but the case also destroyed her family’s privacy. Her aunt, a controversial true crime author, was accused in the media of having some involvement in the murder, and the family has spent the decade since trying to live with the fallout. Now the convicted murderer is appealing his sentence, and a popular true crime podcast has taken up his case, determined to prove that he was wrongly convicted. When the podcast begins to dredge up the old accusations against Mia’s family, she returns to Austria to protect her aunt and set the record straight.

The castle, however, has changed considerably since Mia’s first visit. It has been transformed into a luxury hotel, and Mia manages to get a job as a nanny for the new owner, allowing her to investigate the old murder from inside the property. Naturally, things do not go according to plan. Someone disappears, new evidence surfaces, and Mia begins to question whether the person she helped send to prison was actually responsible for her cousin’s death. And because this is a gothic-tinged thriller, the castle also happens to have some ghosts hanging around.

There is certainly nothing wrong with this basic setup. A murder in an isolated castle, a family with secrets, a questionable conviction, and a protagonist returning to the scene of the crime are all perfectly serviceable thriller ingredients. Add the true crime podcast and the ghosts, and Please Enjoy Your Stay has enough going on to keep the pages turning. Goedjen also gives the novel the sort of remote, atmospheric setting that naturally lends itself to suspense. There is something inherently creepy about an old castle in the Austrian Alps, particularly when its history includes murder and unexplained phenomena.

The problem for me was that there simply wasn’t much beneath those familiar thriller elements to dig into. I kept waiting for the novel to give me something more interesting to analyze, but for the most part, it remained what it appeared to be: an accessible, twisty thriller designed to keep the reader guessing. That’s not necessarily a criticism. Plenty of readers pick up thrillers precisely because they want an entertaining mystery rather than a novel that demands literary dissection. But as someone who tends to look for something more in the books I review, I found Please Enjoy Your Stay fairly limited in that regard.

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What ultimately pulled my rating below an average three stars, though, was the characterization. I didn’t particularly care about any of these people. Mia is supposed to be capable enough to have survived the trauma of witnessing her cousin’s murder and to have spent ten years living with the consequences, but I frequently found her decisions difficult to take seriously. She isn’t exactly the sharpest investigator, which becomes increasingly frustrating when so much of the story depends on her ability to figure out what is really happening. Iris, meanwhile, struck me as so vapid that I had a hard time becoming invested in her at all. A thriller can get away with some pretty implausible circumstances if I care deeply about the people caught in them. Here, I never reached that point.

I also found myself questioning some of the novel’s details because several elements seemed to be constructed around what the story needed rather than what felt convincingly grounded in real life. The result was a number of situations that struck me as contrived, particularly when characters behaved in ways that seemed designed to move the plot toward the next revelation. That can be easier to overlook in a fast-paced thriller, but when the characters themselves aren’t particularly compelling, those contrivances become more noticeable.

Still, Please Enjoy Your Stay did accomplish one important thing: it kept me reading. I never reached the point where I wanted to abandon it, and the mystery was sufficiently engaging that I wanted to find out how everything was going to play out. The castle setting, the murder investigation, the true crime podcast, and the supernatural elements provide enough momentum to carry the story even when the characterization isn’t working particularly well for me.

Ultimately, Please Enjoy Your Stay is the sort of thriller I can imagine being perfectly pleasant vacation reading. It’s easy to get into, there’s a murder to solve, there’s a creepy castle, there are ghosts, and there are plenty of secrets to uncover. I just wanted more from it than the book ultimately gave me. I wouldn’t suggest that readers run out and buy it the day it releases, but if you happen to be standing in an airport bookstore looking for something uncomplicated to read on an international flight to Austria, you could certainly choose worse.

Please Enjoy Your Stay wasn’t a bad enough reading experience to make me wish I had never picked it up. It just wasn’t memorable enough to make me especially glad that I did.

Have you read Please Enjoy Your Stay, or are you planning to pick it up? What do you think makes a thriller work for you when the plot is familiar: compelling characters, an atmospheric setting, genuinely surprising twists, or something else entirely? Share your thoughts in the comments—I’d love to hear what you thought of Tara Goedjen’s gothic thriller.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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