Middle of the Night by Riley Sager is a twist-filled thriller. Middle of the Night begins with a scene that occurs in the middle of the night. A ten-year-old boy wakes to find a slit in his tent. His best friend is missing. The best friend was never found. The boy now a man returns to the house 30 years later to sell it for his parents. The man, still haunted by the instance, always wakes in the middle of the night. He starts seeing strange events. He feels the presence of his best friend. He slowly starts to remember what he blocked. Sager writes a compelling mystery that hooked me from the start. After the initial hook, the story slows down a lot. The book has a lot of exposition to get through and familiarize the reader with the neighbors. I think it was effective but at the same time boring. The story is told in a unique way. It has one perspective in the present day. There are 8 perspectives during the flashbacks of the day before the incident. The reader keeps getting teased about this incident that was done to the missing boy who fell flat for me. The ending pulled everything together and I enjoyed liking it, but not loving it. There were a lot of twists and turns some were clever and some I saw a mile away. The best twist is a personal one to a character that I gasped at. Middle of the Night by Riley Sager was published on June 18, 2024.

Plot Summary: Ethan,10, stirs in the middle of the night. He hears a cut in the fabric of the tent he is sleeping in. He is haunted by the sound. When he wakes up, he finds that the tent has one long slash down it. Billy, his best friend, is missing. Billy was never found. Ethan, now 40, returns to the home where the incident happened. He is there to sell his parent’s home. Upon his return, he starts seeing strange things in the middle of the night. Motion lights flickering at nothing there. He is spooked when a baseball rolls into his yard. That was a thing he and Billy would do acting like it was a ghost. Ethan never told anyone else about this. A body is found on the property of an occultist that could be Billy. The same property that Ethan betrayed Billy 30 years ago.

What I Liked: The first scene of the book and how it hooked me. The ending was not what I was expecting but I liked that there were consequences for parties involved. I like how the Goosebumps books were worked into the story. It highlights one in particular, The Ghost Next Door. This works very well with the narrative of the story. I liked the Hawthorne Institute as a place to study the occult. I still feel the institute was not used the best but it was a good location. I liked Ethan’s Mom’s storyline. The narrative never answered if she worked again. I was bummed we never found that out. I did like that Russ found his brother’s stash of workout mags under his bed. He was too innocent to assume anything else and thought he used them to secretly work out. I did like how Billy got the ghost book and the talk with the librarian.

What I Disliked: The worst final lines ever, “Hakuna Matata Dude.” I hated seeing it as ominous because I kept laughing at it. The incident that keeps getting mentioned was pretty lame. The incident was built up way too much to be what it was. Ethan’s final words were way worse than the incident. Paranormal activity is heavily hinted at. It is a reason the three main incidents happen. The book had a little bit of it but would have been better if it had more. For the longest time, I thought Billy possessed one of the neighbor kids. However, the story did not go that way.

Recommendation: Middle of the Night is an okay thriller. Riley Sager is very good at twists. There were parts of this book that I did not like but it still kept me entertained. I think this book is one of the weakest Riley Sager books. I can not recommend the Middle of the Night, but I can recommend Riley Sager. I thought Middle of the Night is a miss. Yet, the man has consistently written a thriller every year for the last eight years. Check my ranking list of Riley Sager books at the bottom of this review.

Rating: Middle of the Night by Riley Sager I rated 3.3 out of 5.

Ranking: My ranking of the 7 Riley Sager novels that I have read from highest to lowest is: 1) The Last Time I Lied, 2) Home Before Dark, 3)Final Girls, 4) The House Across the Lake, 5) Survive the Night, 6) Middle of the Night, and 7) Lock Every Door.