Here are brief reviews of a few more mysteries and thrillers I’ve read recently.

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

This book was a trip. It’s about a woman whose father wrote a supposedly true story about a haunted house they lived in when she was a kid. The book became a bestseller, and as a result, Maggie’s whole life has been colored by this horror story, which all happened when she was too young to even remember. She believes her father (along with her mother) made it all up for money. Now her father has died, and she learns he left the house to her in his will. Against her mother’s concerns, Maggie returns to the house to fix it up and sell it and along the way, learn what really happened in that house, thereby disproving any supernatural explanation.

The narrative alternates between snippets of Maggie’s father’s book and Maggie’s adventures in the house, It’s interesting to read about how Maggie’s father wrote about the events and how Maggie and the others involved remember them, if at all. There are a ton of secrets to be unearthed in the present day, a decades-old disappearance that might be a murder chief among them. Maggie also has to contend with hostile neighbors who resent the notoriety her father’s book brought to the neighborhood as well as strange goings-on in the house, like things disappearing or moving, a record player that seems to play itself, lights going on when no one is home, and so on. The major reveal is a great one, a fantastic payoff with many layers that caps off a truly entertaining tale.

An Unwanted Guest and A Stranger in the House by Shari Lapena

I read Lapena’s first novel, The Couple Next Door, and thought it was fine. Nothing special, but worth a read. These other two were significant disappointments. One is about a murder in a remote hotel that loses power (this is a common setup in my recent reads!), and the other about a woman who experiences amnesia after a car crash and may have killed someone. Lapena writes in third person, but shifts the perspective frequently back and forth, often within the same page, giving the books a jumpy feel and really limiting the reader’s ability to know or understand any of the characters well. The explanations for the murders seem to come out of left field with little or no actual clues pointing to the solution. Lapena provides a twist at the end of each book, but in one case, it was completely unnecessary and left a bad taste in my mouth (it was presented almost as a triumph when it was decidedly not), and in the other, it revealed the murderer’s motive in a couple of minutes with no lead-up and certainly no reference to actual clues that would have allowed the reader to deduce it themselves. Better books exist.