ARC Review: Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen

October is for thrillers. If you need something to read while the nights get longer and the air gets colder, Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen is exactly the kind of book written for this season. A gothic castle in the Austrian Alps, a decade-old murder, a woman who has never stopped questioning what she saw. This is atmospheric psychological suspense with a dual timeline and a mystery that keeps pulling the floor out from under you. Check out why you need to add it to your TBR!

Please Enjoy Your Stay

by Tara Goedjen
on October 13, 2026
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Goodreads

After a true crime podcast reopens her cousin’s murder case, a woman must confront her past at a glamorous European castle-turned-hotel where she follows a trail of toxic family secrets and deadly lies.
When they were teenagers, Mia’s beloved cousin was murdered during their stay at an infamous castle in the Austrian Alps. As the only witness, Mia’s testimony put the killer behind bars, but it tore her life apart: the media accused her aunt, a controversial true crime author, of being involved. Now, a decade later, the murderer is appealing his conviction, and a popular true crime podcast starts covering the case, determined to exonerate him, and resurfacing lies about Mia’s family in the process.
Desperate to protect her aunt—and what she knows to be the truth—Mia returns to Austria. The castle is being revamped as a luxury hotel, and Mia gets a job as a nanny for the new owner, hiding in plain sight as she investigates, needing to set the story straight once and for all. But after someone mysteriously disappears on the property and sinister new evidence emerges regarding her cousin’s death, she realizes she might have accused the wrong man...and put her own life in danger.

Review

There is something about a cold case that never quite closes. Please Enjoy Your Stay opens with that premise and leans into it: ten years ago, Mia watched her cousin Tristan die at a castle hotel in the Austrian Alps. Her testimony convicted the owner. Now he’s appealing, a true crime podcast is picking apart the case, and Mia is back inside the very building where it happened, working as a nanny and looking for answers she’s not sure she wants.

Tara Goedjen builds this book in two tracks: present-day Mia navigating a crumbling mystery and a job she’s not totally dialed in for, and chapters set in the past that reconstruct the night everything fell apart. The historical chapters don’t just fill in backstory; they create tension against the present, letting you feel the gap between what Mia experienced and what might have actually happened. By the time those two timelines start to converge, the book has centered the unease it’s been building.

The castle-turned-luxury-hotel is the kind of setting that carries its own atmosphere without having to work very hard, and Tara uses it well. Gothic, isolated, full of people that seem like they something to hide. The true crime podcast layer adds something sharp and contemporary, the way public narratives get built around real people, and what it costs the ones who lived through it.

If you like psychological thrillers with a gothic edge and a dual timeline that actually pays off, this one is worth your time!