Best-selling author Riley Sager is back with another blockbuster thriller for your summer book stack — and this time he takes us to a quiet suburban neighborhood where the past continues to haunt the present.
Middle of the Night opens on a July evening in 1994, when 10-year-old Ethan Marsh and his best friend, Billy, are camping in a backyard on their quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. But the next morning, Ethan wakes up alone. During the night, someone sliced through the tent with a knife, and Billy is gone … never to be seen or heard from again.
Fast-forward three decades, and Ethan reluctantly returns to his childhood home, where he starts noticing strange things happening in — you guessed it — the middle of the night. Signs of Billy’s presence are everywhere, and Ethan continues to be haunted by the disappearance and the events leading up to it. Sager deftly flips back and forth between two timelines, introducing characters and filling in details as Ethan tries to solve the 30-year-old mystery.
Sager is known for fast-paced thrillers with titles like Lock Every Door and Home Before Dark, and this one stays true to the formula. But it’s a formula that works. We get twists and turns and cliffhangers a’plenty, as the plot moves from the boys’ homes on Hemlock Circle to a nearby estate in the woods that surround it, where someone is conducting clandestine research.
Fans of Riley Sager will surely appreciate his latest offering. And so will readers like me, who enjoy a little suspense now and then.
