Review: The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was provided an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.  This book was published on March 23, 2021.

This is a fairly slow paced thriller.  I think the comparison to The Blair Witch Project is fair.  It is very much like that given that this follows a film crew making a movie and some strange stuff starts happening.  Blair Witch was a bit more ominous and creepy in my opinion.  I thought the premise was really interesting.  An entire town of people up and disappears without a trace with the exception of a newborn baby and a woman who was stoned to death in the town square.  The police conduct an investigation and no one is able to find anyone from the town.  Now years later, the granddaughter of one the former inhabitants wants to find out what really happened and tell the story of the town.

This is told in two different timelines and different perspectives.  The Now is told from Alice's perspective, and the Then is told from her great-grandmother Elsa's perspective.  We also get letters between Alice's grandmother Margareta and her great-aunt Aina which help paint the story of what happened in the past.  I much preferred the Then sections to the now sections.  I felt like they moved the storyline along a bit more than the Now sections.  I also didn't connect with the present tense characters, and was much more invested in what was happening with the characters from the past.  Alice and her film crew weren't very likable and they were all very unprepared 5 days of filming in an abandoned, rotting, mining town.  There are some pretty unrealistic situations in the book that took me out of the story.  I also didn't appreciate the way mental illness was portrayed in the book.  

I thought the storyline was interesting, however I found the pacing to be far to slow for my liking.  I also found the plot to be very predictable.  I did find the final reveal of what happened to be clever and very fitting, but I kind of suspected something similar to be the case from the start.  This never gave me the creepy and tense thriller vibe I look for in thriller/mysteries.  This book isn't bad, there was just missing for me.  I think alot of people will enjoy this, I think I have high expectations when it comes to thrillers.

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