An Unwanted Guest

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The drive in and a full house
2. Friday night and the small cracks
3. Dana on the stairs
4. Candice and the turn toward panic
5. The storm night and more bodies
6. Who did what, and what bugged me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked this one up because I wanted something cold and fast after two heavier books in a row. A friend had told me it was Lapena doing Agatha Christie in the snow, and that sounded exactly right for a gray weekend. I read most of it with a blanket over my knees, which felt appropriate, since almost everyone in the book is freezing too.

The setup is simple and that is part of the appeal. It is winter in the Catskills. A small group of strangers books a weekend at Mitchell's Inn, a family owned place deep in the woods with big fireplaces, a wine cellar, and trails for skiing and snowshoeing. Then an ice storm hits, the power goes out, the phones die, and nobody can leave. One guest is found dead at the bottom of the stairs. Then another dies. The edition I read is the one first published in 2018 by Pamela Dorman Books, 320 pages, and it moves the way those details suggest. Short chapters. A lot of doors opening and closing. A lot of people lying about small things that turn out to matter.

What I liked right away is how ordinary the arrival feels before it turns bad. That ordinariness makes the later fear more believable.

The drive in and a full house

Gwen Delaney is driving her friend Riley Shuter up to the inn on a Friday afternoon and the road is already bad. Riley is a journalist who covered war zones, including time in Afghanistan, and she came home with trauma that still follows her into loud rooms and sudden noises. Gwen thought a quiet rural weekend might help them both. Instead Gwen slides off the road into a ditch.

Lauren Day and her boyfriend Ian Beeton happen along the same road and stop to help. They see two women in a stuck car and offer them a ride to the same place. So all four arrive together, already a little bonded and a little awkward, which matters later when everyone starts keeping score of who vouched for whom.

Mitchell's Inn is run by James Harwood, the owner and cook, with help from his son Bradley. The storm has kept other staff home, so it is just the two of them handling check in, drinks, and dinner. The guests trickle through the lobby and you get a quick read on each pair.

Beverly and Henry Sullivan are the oldest guests. Beverly pushed for the trip because their marriage has gone flat and she wants to fix it. Henry is annoyed from the start, mostly about the lack of cell service and WiFi, and he does not hide it well.

Dana Hart and Matthew Hutchinson are the glossy young engaged couple. Matthew comes from wealthy old New England money and they are in the middle of planning a big society wedding, so this weekend is supposed to be a break from seating charts and family opinions. They touch each other a lot in public. Other guests notice.

David Paley is there alone. He is a criminal defense attorney from New York City, used to stress, and he wants quiet. People at home whisper about him because his wife died and he was once arrested in connection with it, though the charges were dropped. He carries that history into every room without saying a word about it.

Candice White is also alone. She cares for her aging mother at home and came to the inn to get work done on a book. She asked for privacy and mostly keeps to herself, eating alone and watching the room.

The first evening has that forced holiday feeling. Bradley serves cocktails in the lobby. Everyone introduces themselves. Everyone learns they are snowed in. At the buffet dinner David ends up at Gwen and Riley's table and shows a clear interest in Gwen. Riley thinks she knows his name from somewhere and goes quiet, which makes David uneasy enough to leave early. Beverly and Henry eat in tense silence while Beverly watches Dana and Matthew with something close to envy. Candice sits by herself and observes David and the engaged couple for a little too long.

Friday night and the small cracks

After dinner David and Gwen run into each other in the library. They share champagne and keep talking, and Gwen ends up spending the night in his room. It feels quick, but Lapena writes it as two lonely adults choosing company during a storm, not as true romance. I bought that. Gwen is drawn to someone calm after weeks of worrying about Riley. David is drawn to someone who does not yet know his past.

In another room Beverly tries to start something romantic with Henry and gets shut down. Henry tells her it might be too late for them. That line sits with her. She lies awake, hurt and angry, and through the wall she hears Dana and Matthew arguing next door. She cannot make out every word, but the tone is sharp.

Late that night two people think they hear a muffled scream. Beverly hears it. Riley hears it. Both talk themselves out of it. The wind is loud. The building is old. Nobody wants to get up and check.

That choice bothered me in a good way. It is easy to judge from the couch, but I have done the same thing in hotels, deciding a strange noise was pipes or weather. Lapena uses that normal instinct against the reader.

Riley also tells Gwen that night that she finally placed David's name. He is the lawyer who was arrested after his wife's death. The case went away for lack of evidence, but the stain stayed. Gwen does not know what to do with that information while she is still warm from his bed. That discomfort hangs over Saturday morning.

Dana on the stairs

Saturday morning is cold in a way that gets into the walls. The power is out. Lauren goes downstairs and finds Dana's body at the foot of the main staircase. She screams and the whole inn comes running.

David looks the body over and says what nobody wants to hear. This does not look like a simple fall. James confirms the phone lines are dead too. There is no calling out, no driving out, and no keeping warm except with fireplaces and blankets. David asks them to leave the body alone to protect whatever evidence might exist, so they cover Dana with a sheet where she lies.

Matthew is wrecked. David takes him aside and says plainly that he thinks Dana was murdered. Matthew denies that he and Dana argued the night before, which we later learn is a lie. David tells him to stay in his room until police can arrive and to say nothing without counsel. It is lawyer habit, and under the circumstances it sounds both cold and practical.

At breakfast Candice mentions that Matthew's family is wealthy and well known. Riley quietly tells Gwen about David's arrest history. Suspicion starts to move around the table without landing anywhere.

The group decides to search the hotel for an intruder because the alternative is worse. In an empty room on the third floor they find an unmade bed, as if someone slept there in secret. In the cellar they find a window that is broken but latched from inside, which makes no sense if someone climbed in. Back in the lobby Beverly finally admits she heard Dana and Matthew fighting. Attention swings hard toward Matthew.

I felt for Matthew here even though he lies. His fiancee is dead on the floor and half the room thinks he did it. He reaches for control by denying the fight, which of course makes him look guiltier. People do that. Panic makes smart people stupid.

Candice and the turn toward panic

That afternoon Bradley and Henry clear a path to the icehouse, a bar made of ice on the grounds, and the group gathers there for drinks because nobody wants to sit staring at a covered body. Then someone notices Candice is missing.

David, Gwen, and Bradley go up to her third floor room. The door is locked. Bradley opens it with a key and they find Candice on the floor, strangled with her own scarf. That second death changes the air completely. One death could be a fall. Two is a pattern. The killer is inside with them.

They decide to stay together in the lobby. Beverly becomes hysterical at one point, convinced there is a rat near Dana's body, and they end up moving Dana's corpse out to the icehouse to seal it away from the living area. It is a grim job and Lapena does not dress it up.

That night the talk turns ugly. Lauren points at Riley and says she is holding something back. Riley answers by describing what happened to her overseas, including being held hostage, and how that left her with panic attacks and flashbacks. It is one of the few scenes where the book slows down enough to let someone sound tired instead of clever.

Riley then turns on David in front of everyone and accuses him of killing his wife. David tells the story without much defense. His wife was murdered, he was arrested, the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, and the case was never solved. He does not ask them to like him. He just asks them not to decide he is a murderer because he was once suspected.

Then Ian gets pulled into the light. He tells a story about his younger brother drowning that David senses is false. Pressed, Ian admits he was with his brother, they fought, and he left the boy alone. He has carried that guilt his whole life. Lauren then admits she lied about being with Ian the whole afternoon Candice was killed. She was trying to protect him, but now he has no alibi.

This stretch is where my patience thinned a little. Every single person has a hidden wound, and they all choose the same night to unpack it. Riley's trauma feels specific and researched. Ian's confession feels thinner, more like a device to spread suspicion evenly. Still, the effect works. By midnight I suspected almost everyone, which is the point of this kind of story.

The storm night and more bodies

Around one in the morning on Sunday, Matthew snaps. He grabs his gun and says he is going to hunt the killer himself. David follows him into the dark hotel to stop him from doing something irreversible. Soon after, shots are heard near the woodshed.

The sound undoes Riley. She bolts out into the ice storm in panic. Gwen, James, Bradley, Lauren, and Ian run after her into wind and darkness, calling her name, splitting up, losing sight of each other. It is chaotic and frightening, and Lapena writes the cold well. You can feel how fast exposed skin would go numb.

In that mess Bradley is killed. David and James find him struck on the head with a heavy iron boot scraper from the porch. They carry him inside and place him in the icehouse with Dana. Riley is still missing. Back in the lobby Henry, terrified, suggests they kill Ian themselves before Ian can kill them. David shuts that down hard.

Toward dawn the power comes back. Henry is found dead in his chair. Just like that. No struggle. No noise. The survivors stare at one more body and the math stops making sense.

James gets the phone lines working and calls for help. Sergeant Margaret Sorensen arrives by snowmobile, then a forensics team. They find Riley's body in the woods. She died of exposure after running out unprepared. Police also find a small diamond earring frozen in the snow beneath the spot where Bradley's body had lain. Ian identifies it. It belongs to Lauren. Sorensen arrests Lauren Day for Bradley's murder.

That arrest scene is quiet rather than dramatic, which I appreciated. No speech. Just an earring in a bag and a woman who stops pretending she does not know what it means.

Who did what, and what bugged me

Lauren's story comes out in pieces. Years earlier, in a group home, Lauren killed a boy. She buried that past and built a new life with Ian. Then she checked into Mitchell's Inn and recognized Dana. Dana was Dani back then, someone who knew what Lauren had done. Lauren was afraid Dana would expose her, so she confronted Dana on the stairs, pushed her, and then smashed her head against the bottom step to make sure she died.

Bradley saw something that night. He slipped an anonymous note into Lauren's book to let her know she had been seen. Lauren misread the situation and thought Candice was the one pressuring her, so she went to Candice's room and strangled her with Candice's own scarf. She messed up the empty third floor room to suggest a secret intruder. When the search for Riley threw the inn into chaos, Lauren used the darkness to kill Bradley with the boot scraper. She lost her earring in the snow without noticing.

If that were the whole ending, it would be a neat locked room solution. But Lapena adds one more turn.

Beverly had learned Henry was having an affair by looking through his phone. During the earlier hotel search she stole powerful sleeping pills belonging to Lauren. Later that night she slipped those pills into Henry's scotch. He died in his chair while everyone was watching Lauren. Beverly counted on the fact that Lauren could not defend herself without admitting her own crimes. At the end, as Beverly drives away from the inn a widow, she smiles.

That final smile is the image that stayed with me. Lauren killed out of fear of being exposed. Beverly killed out of anger and calculation, then let a trapped woman take the blame. The book wants you to sit with which one feels colder.

I should be honest about what did not work for me. The prose is choppy by design, lots of short paragraphs and repeated thoughts, and after a while it flattens out. Too many backstories arrive on cue. David's dead wife, Riley's hostage months, Ian's brother, Beverly's dead marriage, Matthew's money, Candice's sick mother. Taken one by one they are sad and plausible. Stacked together they start to feel like cards being dealt. Kirkus made the same complaint when the book came out, saying Christie did this kind of story much better, and I get why. The reveal leans on a past that readers had no fair way to guess, and on a case of mistaken identity with the blackmail note that felt convenient to me.

Still, I finished it fast and I did not guess the full shape. I had Lauren pegged as suspicious fairly early because her concern for Ian kept sliding into control, but I missed Beverly completely. I also thought David might be the killer because the book points at him so hard, which in hindsight was the trick. If you want deep psychology or people to love, this is not that book. Most of these guests are selfish or brittle or both, apart from Candice, who is the only one I truly felt sorry for. If you want a snowed in puzzle with a rising body count, short chapters, and a last page that reframes the quietest person in the room, this delivers.

Read it when you have a free evening and cold weather outside. Keep track of who was where on Saturday afternoon, because that is where the truth hides. And pay attention to Beverly when she goes quiet. I dismissed her as background noise about her marriage, which is exactly what she wanted everyone to do.

FAQ

When was An Unwanted Guest published?

It was first published in 2018 by Pamela Dorman Books. The US hardcover runs 320 pages with ISBN 9780525557623.

Who is the killer in An Unwanted Guest?

Lauren Day kills Dana, Candice, and Bradley to hide her past as Dani from a group home. Beverly Sullivan separately poisons her husband Henry with stolen sleeping pills.

Is An Unwanted Guest part of a series?

No, it stands alone. It shares an author with The Couple Next Door but no characters or plot carry over.