While I recommend Alex North for thriller/horror books, which have a supernatural element to them, I highly recommend Riley Sager if you want hard core thriller/horror books to read. Here are the four I read this year before getting back to my writing.
The Only One Left
At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope
Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.
Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life
It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer-I want to tell you everything.
“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead
As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth-and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.
This is the first Riley Sager book I read and it made me want to read more. If you love adult horror, I highly recommend these.
How can one resist a story about a rich old family living in a clifftop mansion, perilously close to the edge, with murder, money, and so many secrets hidden away. Not to mention an old wives’ tale sing-along about the family.
And the twist at the end had me crying. CRYING! I tells ya.
I gave this 9/10
Home Before Dark
Every house has a story to tell and a secret to share.
Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal her father recounted in a memoir called House of Horrors. His story of supernatural happenings and malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.
Maggie was too young to remember any of the horrific events that supposedly took place, and as an adult she doesn’t believe a word of her father’s claims. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When she inherits Baneberry Hall after his death and returns to renovate the place and sell it, her homecoming is anything but warm. The locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous, and human characters with starring roles in House of Horrors are waiting in the shadows.
Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place where unsettling whispers of the past lurk around every corner. And as Maggie starts to experience strange occurrences ripped from the pages of her father’s book, the truth she uncovers about the house’s dark history will challenge everything she believes.
The second Sager book I read has twisty twists and turns that kept me reading on. Just when you think you know what happened, another chapter tells a different tale.
And just when you think you believe in ghosts, something comes along to tell you it ain’t necessarily so.
And just when you think it’s going to be wrapped up in a bow, everyone’s demons come out to play.
As much as I hate thieving arseholes, the truth is finally revealed.
I gave this book 9/10 as well.
The Last Time I Lied
Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. But the games ended the night Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin into the darkness. The last she–or anyone–saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips.
Now a rising star in the New York art scene, Emma turns her past into paintings–massive canvases filled with dark leaves and gnarled branches that cover ghostly shapes in white dresses. When the paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale, she implores Emma to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor. Seeing an opportunity to find out what really happened to her friends all those years ago, Emma agrees.
Familiar faces, unchanged cabins, and the same dark lake haunt Nightingale, even though the camp is opening its doors for the first time since the disappearances. Emma is even assigned to the same cabin she slept in as a teenager, but soon discovers a security camera–the only one on the property–pointed directly at its door. Then cryptic clues that Vivian left behind about the camp’s twisted origins begin surfacing. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing mysterious threats in the present. And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale and what really happened to those girls, the more she realizes that closure could come at a deadly price.
This book started off reminding me of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the disappearance of three girls in white frilly dresses. Who are what Emma paints. A LOT.
There was a lot of gaslighting going on in this book, and getting drunk does not help. But…she did.
Emma may have had a psychotic style break after the three original girls went missing, but that was understandable. Drinking didn’t help in the slightest, neither did all of the lies everyone kept telling.
When the new girls go missing, and Emma is the only one who knows where to look, she finds them, and then finds the others from fifteen years ago. Except not all of them. And it’s finally revealed what happened all those years ago when Emma was just thirteen and spending the summer at her first camp.
The only problem I had was there was no ending for what one of the girls did. It’s fifteen years on. How did she manage that and where has she been?
I gave this book 8/10 for all the deaths. And I cried, because killing off kids makes me cry.
Lock Every Door
They’ve offered you a luxury apartment, rent free.
THE CATCH: you may not live long enough to enjoy it…
No visitors. No nights spent away from the apartment. No disturbing the other residents.
These are the only rules for Jules Larson’s new job as apartment sitter for an elusive resident of the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan’s most high-profile private buildings and home to the rich and famous.
Recently heartbroken and practically homeless, Jules readily accepts the terms, ready to leave her past life behind.
Out of place among the extremely wealthy, Jules finds herself pulled toward other apartment sitter Ingrid. But Ingrid confides that the Bartholomew is not what it seems and the dark history hidden beneath its gleaming facade is starting to frighten her. Jules brushes it off as a harmless ghost story – but the next day, her new friend has vanished.
And then Jules discovers that Ingrid is not the first temporary resident to go missing…
Welcome to the Bartholomew…You may never leave.
Murder mystery, crime thriller galore. This dude knows how to write, and as a former journalist, he should.
Set in The Bartholomew, based on The Dakota, in New York, it’s a twisty turny mystery of what’s going on and how many people know it.
Turns out, they all did.
All of the current tenants, past tenants, all of the doormen, everyone who had set foot through the front door. Except for the apartment sitters. The ones who would never leave. Until Jules moved in…
The only issue I had was the backstory concerning her parents and sister. The mystery was never solved about her missing sister, and the only thing Jules had to remember her family by was a photo of the three of them that she took. However, after her parents died, she found several storage units at a facility that had hers and her sisters belongings, and the family car was left safe and sound.
Yet all she had was the photo and there was nothing about the rest of the belongings left behind or what happened to them except she didn’t have them anymore.
I gave this book 9.5/10
After reading these four books and giving them high marks, I wondered what it would take for me to give them 10/10. Three came close, let me tell you, but when it comes to death of good people/kids/teens, I take off one. And then there’s idiot/drunk women. There’s another one off because to me, drunk, drugged out, stupid women making stupid choices is a turn off. Thankfully, the women in Riley’s stories don’t do too much of that, and in the end they grow a pair and do what needs to be done.