I received this book in exchange for a honest review from NetGalley.

I was really loving this book most of the way through. There definitely some trigger warnings for anyone who is sensitive to mentions of rape and non-consent. The story starts out as an excellent run of the mill haunted house with your standard damaged protagonist. The whole thing is just brimming with atmosphere and gothic stylings. But the ending just ruined this story for me. I really liked the protagonist until the end when she became an absolute helpless potato and the bad guy just gets away with the whole thing. Yeah he brings down the house but a what cost...

"The Antiques Roadshow, if Stephen King was the host... " that was the line that hooked me into reading this, I'm glad I did because it was very enjoyable.

There were a lot of really good ideas in Painted by Kirsten McKenzie - a secluded, possibly haunted house, a young woman with a tragic past, and pictures that change when you're not looking at them! It's just really difficult to keep interest sustained when there is only one character in a book for a large part of the story. I found my interest waning by about the 1/4 mark, and almost didn't finish reading the book. Things do pick up when other characters come into the story, and there was an interesting twist or two, so I did end up finishing it. Unfortunately, the word choices and sentence structure here are a little strange and they often took me out of the story. (I even tried to find out if this was a translated work, but found nothing saying it was.) The ending was also a bummer, which didn't help. Thanks for the opportunity to read this. Sorry it was just not my thing.

I couldn’t put this book down, it was gripping!
It starts off on quite a similar track to ‘Woman in Black’ and builds up quite a bit of tension with its ‘owner has just died leaving a large empty estate which needs to be packed up’ premise. Throw in the protagonist stumbling across the family graveyard and the feeling that you aren’t alone and you have the beginnings of a classic creepy haunted house novel. The story has plenty of ‘jumpy’ moments and is quite fast paced. I loved the supernatural element, I felt it was unique to the story and without giving any spoilers, it certainly changes the way you look at old paintings!
I did feel that the main character, Anita, had a backstory that didn’t need to be tied up to the main story, it seemed to over complicate it and there were times where I got confused between the unnamed men, the artist and the man in black, were they the same? how did their stories relate? It wasn’t too clear to me, even at the end when all was revealed I had to really think about who was who. But apart from that, I really enjoyed the book and would recommend to anyone who likes scary stories!

Oddly enough, McKenzie's novel, albeit falling under the horror genre, does come across as a bit of fun in some ways, although the tension is palpable and the ramp up of threat maintained right from the start. All in all, while the nail biting plot has the reader hooked, the author doesn't play it safe with the ending, providing, thus, a gripping horror story.