Middle of the Night by Riley Sager

 

From the blurb:

"The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.

Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul de sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?

The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed monsters roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.

The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present."

My thoughts:  I've read six other books by Riley Sager: I really liked three of them, disliked two, and thought the sixth landed somewhere in the middle. So I didn't know what to expect with this one. But I'm happy to report that I ended up really liking it. Ethan's guilt and grief felt so real, as did his desire to figure out what happened to his friend that long ago night. And Sager does an excellent job of interweaving the past with the present through the different characters' POVs. The way he lets the story unfold builds good suspense and made me want to keep reading. I also really liked the touch of supernatural in it. All in all, this is a fun mystery!

My rating:  4.5/5 stars.

Happy Reading!

The other three Riley Sager novels I really liked:

Home Before Dark

The Last Time I Lied

Lock Every Door

I did post reviews of the other three Sager books that I've read, so you can find them on my blog if you're interested in knowing what I didn't like about them.