Today’s review is on Riley Sager’s newest book The Middle of the Night.
In The Middle of the Night, for reasons entirely unknown to me, two young friends decide to camp out in the backyard on a hot summer night. Ethan wakes up taking a moment to orient himself in the oppressive summer heat only to realize that the tent they’ve been in has been sliced open in the night and that his friend Billy is gone. The community searches but he is never found. 30 years later Ethan returns to the idyllic cul-de-sac and strange happenings follow. What follows is the story of a friend lost too soon and a reminder that even in the quietest, safest communities, everyone has secrets.
I’m going to start with the couple of things that bugged me and then explain why I give it 4 stars anyway.
There was a lot of misdirection, intended to make the twists throughout more surprising. I found that they led me to the answers long before we had them, and I love to be shocked. I would have been without some of the extra threads that gave me too much insight too early. A shadowy organization is always fun to explore in a novel, except when we basically don’t bother to. It wasn’t needed for the plot of the book, but I wanted it to play into the it more and to have way more details. Give me all the tea. Finally, it has a slow start. It takes about 100 pages to take off, which is annoying in a thriller and in my experience an unusual start to one of Sager’s novels.
BUT!! 4 stars anyway because I rate books by how I feel reading them, not for literary perfection. I had a lot of fun with this one. Once it was going, I was along for the ride and stayed on until we arrived at the station. The main character is pretty interesting, and we get to consider some wild concepts given his backstory. He was a fully fleshed-out protagonist that I didn’t always know what to think of. The cast of side characters provided compelling suspects but were also sympathetic. I wanted to see how everything worked out for all of them.
While reading I often set alarms, so I don’t totally lose track of time and end up 4 hours later basically waking from a book coma wondering how I got there. With this book, I completely ignored the alarm and finished the whole thing before doing anything else.
Sorry, chores I had reading to do.
Pick up Middle of the Night at bookshop.org here.
Discover more from Stressy Lemon
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
