I don't like novels written in present tense. Screenplays are written in present tense, that is the way it is done. Novels make lousy screenplays and screenplays make lousy novels: Even when they tell the same story they are two different animals.
People do not normally talk in present tense, when they do they normally mean the immediate future, "I am going to the store, wanna join me?" does not mean the speaker is walking away while talking, it means they will go in a few minutes.
Some things become more difficult to do in present tense and some of that has to do with what a novel does best: Get inside the character.
I did not expect anyone to be in the study. I had entered this room a thousand times and no one had been there. Not since uncle Jeremy had left home to go exploring Africa six years ago had anyone so much as bothered to dust it. I had often wondered what had happened to him, and I had asked once or twice over the years but no one seemed to care.
When I opened the door there was someone there, in fact it was uncle Jeremy, but he wasn't going to tell me what had happened to him over the last few years, or over the last few minutes. Uncle Jeremy was dead.
In order to do the same thing in present tense you have to write the first senctence in present tense, which would make a silly sounding sentence, then slip into past until you come to the next paragraph then go back to present tense.
To me, even if you get used to reading in present tense every time you have to go to past tense it is jarring.