Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an arc in exchange for my honest review.

Publication Date: October 13, 2026

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 320

Genre: Mystery

Rating: 3/5

Please Enjoy Your Stay is an atmospheric mystery involving a true crime podcast reinvestigating the conviction of the owner of an infamous castle in Austria. Our protagonist, Mia, stayed at the castle with her aunt and cousin due to her aunt’s work as a true crime writer. Mia was recently orphaned and barely a teenager when her aunt took her in and she became close to her older teenager cousin, Tristan. Her family quickly became enmeshed with the owner and his workers and towards the end of their stay Mia sees the owner kill Tristan. But did she really? When Mia and her Aunt hear about the podcast and the castle being renovated into a hotel Mia decides to infiltrate as a nanny to the new owner’s daughter. One reason being that Mia’s aunt never had a chance to grab all her notes from that summer and they think maybe the answers are in there. Upon arriving a new disappearance and secrets being revealed lead Mia to realizing she may have been wrong. And now is in more danger than she could imagine.

The strongest aspect of this mystery is the setting. The castle is creepy, unsettling, and isolated surrounded by woods in the Austrian Alps. Goedjen did a great job creating such vivid imagery that I could easily picture everything that was happening. I also enjoyed the way this story was told. We start in the now timeline and get sprinkles of flashbacks that give us a fuller picture of what led to the murder of Tristan. We also get podcast episodes throughout the story which gives Mia information she wasn’t aware of.

For a just over 300 page book and the amount of interesting elements the pacing of this book is slow and uneven. I don’t mind when a book is slowly building up to the something but this was a lot of one step forward two steps back. Although, that may be because I found Mia to be a very frustrating character. She is there to investigate but yet she spends a large portion of the book just rejecting everything new she is learning. I also think Goedjen was trying set her up to be an unreliable narrator but it was done in such a clumsy way that I just found myself being irritated by a lot of Mia’s choices.

This is Goedjen’s adult debut and I’m not sure if that is why there are so much going on in this book. There were unrealized supernatural elements, a possible romance, fractured family dynamics, and the true crime case that Mia’s aunt was originally investigating. You add in the complexities of Mia trying to hide her real identity, the drama of the hotel opening and Mia nannying there is a lot for this book to balance. And unfortunately it wasn’t always successful. I do think that the aspects of the aunt and her subplot of writing the book should have been cut. In reality it ultimately led to nothing and could have helped the pacing of the story if we had focused less on that and more on other things. Another thread of the story was the critique of true crime and the lack of empathy for the people involved. Which is valid but the amount of time devoted to it also contributed to the uneven pacing.

Overall, I do think that lovers of the mystery genre would find elements of this book compelling enough to warrant giving this book a try. While I didn’t love this book I did enjoy myself and there were moments of tension and suspense that kept me engaged enough to want to keep reading.