By Riley Sager
This book is about a young woman, Maggie Holt, going back to the house that scared her family away in the middle of the night twenty-five years ago leading to her father’s nonfiction bestseller. Baneberry Hall is still in the family, to her shock, and she is given the keys along with the rest of her father’s estate upon his death. Maggie has spent most of her life hating “The Book” as she calls it. The fans that plague her because of it, the media requests from it, and ultimately the house that inspired it are all things she would rather do without. Deciding to debunk the book once and for all, she returns to flip the house for a profit and move on with her life.
As we glimpse passages from her father’s book, it eerily parallels events and items unfolding around her back on the property. She believed the book to be fiction her whole life, despite both her mother and father, now divorced, refusing to speak of it or the events that led to its publication. Slowly, Maggie is forced to concede at least some aspects of it are true, and if those are, is everything? Characters from the book and/or their descendants all seem to corroborate the truth in the book, from her child psychiatrist, to the previous resident’s tragedy, to the families that live on the property as caretaker and housekeeper. And the truth is sinister and haunted. What really made her parents leave in the dead of night, never to come back? What tragedies actually befell the house’s residents and what were the motivations? What is truth and what is fiction?
I loved this book! I am calling it now as the twisty, turny thriller of this year!! It is a great, chilling, ghost story, complete with ominously named apparitions, or are they imaginary friends? Things go bump in the night as specific times, just like Amityville Horror, and there are creepy characters woven through the history of the house. If it is haunted, who is doing it? Is Maggie safe, or is anyone around her? I thought I predicted two different endings, and while those were touched on, things were even crazier that I was not even close to predicting!! Go. Read. This. Book.
Soundtrack
- Every Breath You Take by The Police
- Maneater by Hall & Oates
- Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by The Beatles
- Ghost by Parachute
- Ghosts That We Knew by Mumford & Sons
Pros & Cons & Potential Spoilers
Pros
- A great ghost story within the story
- So. Many. Twists at the end
- SPOILER – secret passages