Book Review – Middle of the Night by Riley Sager

Ethan Marsh returns to his childhood home to find that he still hasn’t dealt with the guilt from his best friend disappearing when they were kids. When his friend’s body is found, odd things begin happening and Ethan embarks on a journey through his neighborhood and his past to discover what really happened thirty years ago.

Riley Sager’s venture into the mysterious haunting of someone who has not one, but two deaths to deal with is hard to put down. The narrator is unreliable for he keeps aspects of his current situation secret so you never quite know what is going on.

The book has two timelines – one that takes place today from the main characters perspective, and one that takes place thirty years ago and deals with various characters comings and goings. The past always has something to do with the present. There is one point where one of the characters tries to convince Ethan that he was responsible for his friend’s death, and it immediately made me think that person was the actual killer. That is the thing with Sager’s writing. It is full of red herrings, and sometimes the red herring ends up being not so much of a false positive in the end.

This is a quick read full of likable yet flawed characters who are brought together by a tragic event in the past. Sager poses this as a ghost story, and while all the characters are haunted in some way, it is not by anything supernatural. That is very much a compliment.

4 out of five stars.