A review by _pauline
Middle of the Night by Riley Sager

dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

this is going to be a long review; the short version is: perfect, loved it.

this is my 4th riley sager book & he’s already become one of my favourite authors. it might take a little while to get into his books but then I can’t put them down.

I think this had the perfect balance of unpredictability (if that’s a word) & clues/logic - it kept me guessing the entire time, but in hindsight everything made so much sense. I feel like I should’ve seen the signs (like
russ being left out + his anger issues, that billy didn’t scream bc he knew the person - but apart from his parents that could also be one of his friends - or the mention of the second key that was given to the barringers, or how nobody knew where billy’s brother was & whether he’d been informed of the discovery of billy’s bones, and that he could know things that seemingly only billy knew, or how “the barringer boy“ could also mean him & not billy, or what ashley said about the party that day & how she’d find a way to get there + that she was driving at 15 w/o a license - by the end I’d completely forgotten about that; also how the slash in the tent ended up being only indirectly connected to billy’s disappearance, bc who tf would cut open a tent to grab sb instead of simply opening it
). but despite all of that, there were many surprising (to me) twists. pretty much the only thing I predicted was that
henry would disappear at some point

I was also positively surprised that in the end
there was no big supernatural explanation (which I know riley sager has done before & I liked it in
the house across the lake,
+ it did play a role again in the lake/drowning scene at the end, but I kind of wanted the baseballs etc to have a different explanation & they did). I also liked how many people were involved in billy’s death in some way (instead of a simple solution with one villain) & the way the story was told from different perspectives but with one dominant pov/mc

my ranking so far:
  1. middle of the night (5⭐️)
  2. last time i lied (5⭐️)
  3. the house across the lake (4.75⭐️)
  4. lock every door (4.5⭐️)
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