It’s a good life except for the increasingly creepy interactions she has with John Neville, one of the porters. Sharing a picturesque set of rooms with the flamboyant and beautiful April Clarke-Cliveden, she divides her time between rigorous studying and energetic socializing with Emily Lippmana, Ryan Coates, Hugh Bland, and Will de Chastaigne, with whom she shares an attraction even though he's April’s boyfriend. Hannah Jones arrives at Oxford hardly believing that she’s been accepted into this haven of learning and wealth. Ten years after having discovered her Oxford roommate’s dead body in front of the fireplace in their room, a young woman struggles with the realization that she may have helped send the wrong man to prison.

This is, however, a minor complaint about what is a generally entertaining work of psychological suspense.Ī return to form for this popular author. Sager is already asking readers to suspend disbelief, and he makes that more difficult because it’s such a jolt when a character pulls out an iPhone or mentions eBay.

When Maggie wants to learn more about the history of Baneberry Hall, she drives to the town library instead of going online. For example, when the Holt family moved into Baneberry Hall in 1995 or thereabouts, Ewan-a professional journalist-worked on a typewriter. As was the case with past novels, though-especially The Last Time I Lied (2018)-Sager sets his story in the present while he seems to be writing about the past. The ghosts and poltergeist activity Sager conjures are truly chilling, and he does a masterful job of keeping readers guessing until the very end. Ewan and Maggie both behave with the dogged idiocy common among people who buy haunted houses, but doubt about the veracity of Ewan’s book and Maggie’s desperate need to understand her own past make them both compelling characters. Interspersing Maggie’s story with chapters from her father’s book, Sager delivers something like a cross between The Haunting of Hill House and The Amityville Horror with a tough female protagonist. Final Girls (2017) remains his most fresh and inventive novel, but his latest is significantly more satisfying than the two novels that followed. As he has in his previous three novels, the author makes contemporary fiction out of time-honored tropes.

Horror aficionados will feel quite cozy as they settle into this narrative, and Sager’s fans will recognize a familiar formula. Determined to find out the truth behind her father’s sensational bestseller, Maggie returns to Baneberry Hall.

Ewan made his name as a writer-and ruined her life-by writing a supposedly nonfiction account of the terrors their family endured while living in this grand Victorian mansion with a dark history. When Maggie Holt’s father, Ewan, dies, she’s shocked to discover that she has inherited Baneberry Hall. Spectral danger and human evil stalk Sager’s latest stalwart heroine.

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager