Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Dutton Books for gifting me a review copy of Home Before Dark by Riley Sager.

This is only my second Sager book (the first being Lock Every Door) and overall I’m pretty new to the thriller game. But let me tell you, I was hooked from the start of this one. Did it make me jumpy. Yes. Did I freak out when my husband opened a squeaky door but didn’t come into the room right away because he’d forgotten something? Hells yes! Now that I think about it maybe this is why I haven’t read very many thrillers...I’m a big ‘ol scaredy pants.

But all those bumps, creaks and groans (I’m sure now were the wind...right? RIGHT?!) didn’t get me to put it down, I devoured it.

I loved the book within a book format, and the story being split between the past and the present, slowly giving you a little more of the story with each switch.

While I didn’t particularly love the main characters, the story was paced perfectly to keep anticipation high. And I really felt like I was there at the house with them...maybe a little too much 💀

If you love a spine tingler then definitely check this one out! Oh and did I mention you can get a version with a glow-in-the-dark cover?!

Synopsis:

What was it like? Living in that house.

Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.

Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.