The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf

Title: The Overnight Guest

Author: Heather Gudenkauf

Series: n/a

Great but falls apart

I would like to thank Heather Gudenkauf, Harlequin, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a free ARC in exchange for an honest review. Also thanks to Justine Sha for inviting me to participate in the blog tour.

I really liked this book! I read to over 60% in one sitting but forced myself to put it down and go to sleep because it was four in the morning. I only meant to read until I was drowsy but it never happened, lol! I read the rest of it a couple days later, again in one sitting. It started out tense and just built and built at a steady pace with well-placed reveals . . . to a point.

What I loved most was the fact that it was set in my backyard, literally just a couple hours away, with very relatable weather. I’m watching a snow storm out the window as I write this review, though luckily nothing as bad as in the book. It’s always neat to read books set near your home, it makes the story feel more personal, and not many books are set in Iowa. Understandably. Not very exciting out here.

But as much as I enjoyed this thriller, I had some problems with it, too.

First, there seemed to be some continuity issues/unclear timing; fingers crossed that these issues were fixed in the final. Examples: in the beginning a woman got out of bed to look out the window, then a few paragraphs later she was staring at the ceiling, presumably lying in bed—but it never said she’d returned to bed. A few times the position of the sun or moon didn’t seem to jibe with the time it was supposed to be. But the biggest and most confusing instance was toward the end—

If you didn’t take the spoiler warning above seriously, now’s the time to reconsider.

On “game day,” the Woman said Dad habitually left at six, went for coffee and a donut, and was always back by eight. It’s horribly unclear if she means a.m. or p.m. Presumably 6 a.m., considering the coffee and donut, but I have no idea if she meant 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.; was his coffee run two hours long or did he go to work from there and get home late? From what I understand, the Woman and girl begin their escape not long after he left in the morning—but they don’t wreck the truck until late at night and aren’t discovered by Wylie until the wee hours. I know they had to switch to Plan B and couldn’t go very fast in the truck, but it did not take them 18 hours to get out of the basement and drive a couple miles. How could they have left at night, anyway? Did Dad live at the location where he kept them? That was also unclear. If he did, he surely might have heard the glass break, garage door rise, and truck start.

Speaking of their escape, why in the world did the Woman decide to try to escape in the middle of winter? I understand if perhaps she didn’t have a good grasp of day, month, and year in captivity—or maybe she did, considering she knew when it was Easter—but she could see the snow packed up against the window and feel the cold in the basement. Easy enough to infer it was winter. She knew they wouldn’t have adequate supplies and that it was possible they’d be on foot—so why in god’s name didn’t she wait for better conditions? There was no urgent reason to leave—well, I mean, obviously she’d want to end their captivity sooner than later, but it wasn’t like they were expecting him to come back and kill them that day. They’d learned to store up food and could get out to get more if necessary. She could have waited until it was less likely they’d die of exposure.

Yeah, their escape had a lot of holes in it. Lots of questions. Which leads me to my second big problem with the book—the ending. It really fell apart. There was the escape that didn’t make much sense, then the whole climax was pretty lame. The tension flatlined when Dad didn’t seem to consider the women much of a threat (and they really weren’t, sadly). He kinda just laughed at them and meandered his way around. He wasn’t sinister or even all that scary, just an arrogant creep. Also, I don’t understand why it went down the way it did. Why on earth didn’t Wylie let Jackson out of the shed to help? See if he had a functional cell phone on him, or ask him to use his radio like she had half a mind to do herself? Why did the Woman literally just sit on the couch and let Dad go after the girl, let Wylie and the girl do the fighting, let the girl pull the trigger? She finally had a chance to fight back, no matter how futile she might have thought her efforts would be, but she did nothing. Didn’t she have any pent up rage to expend? Shouldn’t she have been willing to do all she could to stop him and protect her child? I cannot express how incredibly unsatisfying it was that she just sat there.

Also during the end there was a moment I could have smacked Wylie, a stupid mistake that really lowered my respect for her. She got within reach of the villain. NEVER get within reach while they’re still breathing. Stupid, stupid. I doubted her intelligence for a couple other reasons; she had a million flashlights and extra batteries, that was excellent, but as afraid as she was of being trapped in the dark and cold, why didn’t she have a generator? Any kind of generator. Why didn’t she bring in a whole bunch of kindling and wood when she knew the storm was on its way so she wouldn’t have to go get them in the middle of the night in the middle of a storm? Also, she could have had a box fan or something to blow the heat of the fire around. And where were the candles? Kerosene lanterns? Emergency heat packs? The narrative acted like flashlights, a paltry wood fire, and some musty old blankets were her only choices.

Those were my biggest grievances. Otherwise I just have questions—did Dad set fire to the wrecked truck to destroy evidence, or did a downed electric wire really hit the gas tank somehow and make it go boom? Cause I have a very hard time believing that, and it never said either way. I also have a hard time believing they would have wrecked that badly by just sliding off the road. Maybe I missed something, but unless you go down a ravine or some sharp incline, it’s not likely you’ll flip the truck, tear a bunch of pieces off, and get thrown from the vehicle just by sliding on ice into the ditch. A ditch full of snow. Going a cautious speed. I’ve done it a few times myself, and hitting deer in the fall does a lot more damage than going in the ditch in a snowstorm. Why was there gas in that truck, anyway? Did he actually drive it around? That’d be pretty ballsy. Why didn’t he get rid of it?

I’m sure I’d have other questions about loose threads if I thought hard enough—like, so if Jackson wasn’t burning evidence in that tire fire, what in the world was it all about, then? Or why did Dad choose that day, of all days, to use the additional lock? Did he know she was sneaking about? Why wasn’t Dad concerned about the snowplow and the presence of another witness?—but I’ve made my point. (Apologies if any of those were explained and I just wasn’t paying attention.)

Overall, Gudenkauf writes excellent rising tension, sets up a great mystery, and can balance POVs well, but she needs to close her plot holes, further consider logistics, and generally work on her endings. The reader shouldn’t be left with questions.

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