It has been a long time since a haunted house novel truly grabbed ahold of me and wouldn’t let go. This novel, with its dueling narratives between Maggie Holt and her father Ewan, is rife with conflict and suspense.

Maggie, you see, was once a little girl taken by her parents one summer in the early 1990s to renovate a large fading mansion. During that summer, things occurred that caused Maggie’s family to flee the property and inspired her father to write a book, House of Horrors, about the haunting of Baneberry Hall.

The events of her childhood and the novel her father wrote have plagued Maggie well into her 30s. The biggest problem for her is that she insists she barely remembers that summer and the novel, as far as she’s concerned, is purely fabricated. She decides, because the property has sat abandoned since her family fled it 30 years earlier, to take on the renovation herself and prove once and for all that the little girl her father wrote about in his “cheesy horror novel” is not the same as the tough independent woman Maggie has become.

What makes this novel compelling is the haunting questions: “Was it all made up?” “If so, what or who is trying to scare Maggie in the present?”

The mystery as well as the sexual tension between Maggie and Dane, the son of the former caretaker whom she hires as a contractor to help with the renovations. Likewise important is the character conflict between Maggie and her parents, both of whom she thinks have lied to her all her life about the events in Baneberry Hall, their subsequent Divorce, and then the discovery of old bones in the house which may have been their since the time of her family’s occupancy.

I endeavor never to give too much away with my reviews as I hate “spoilers.” But I look forward to reading more of Riley Sager in years to come. This novel was compelling, suspenseful, and at times very creatively creepy.

5-out-of-5

XOXO

J.W.A.