Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Audiobook: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Spice: N/A

by Riley Sager (June 18, 2024) Many thanks to @prhaudio for the gifted digital copy of this very intense book. Sager has again created an edge-of-your-seat thriller that will keep you guessing. Below is my honest review.

In the summer Ethan Marsh and his neighbor and best friend Billy were ten, they camped in Ethan’s backyard on Hemlock Circle every Friday night. On the Saturday that would change everything, Ethan awakes to a slit cut into the tent and no sign of Billy except his shoes. That was thirty years ago, and Billy hasn’t been seen since. After a lifetime of being tormented by nightmares of the sound of a knife slicing through the tent but no memories that could help the police, Ethan has avoided Hemlock Circle. But with his parents moving to Florida, his life at a crossroads, and the offer of the house to him, Ethan finds himself back in his childhood home, where he begins to sense Billy all around him. As mysterious things begin to happen, Ethan starts to investigate Billy’s death and discovers that many secrets hide beneath the idyllic facade of Hemlock Circle.

The story unfolds in a dual timeline between the present in Ethan’s POV and the past in a series of time-stamped chapters from different character POVs on Friday, July 15, and Saturday, July 16, 1994. Books often take us out of reality and transport us to a place or situation we can only imagine. In this case, Sager does the opposite, creating an intense thriller out of deeply relatable things – the motion lights going on at night, being outside alone, a baseball in the yard, the woods behind your suburban house, where your parent always told you not to go. Sager made it so I won’t be walking through the backyard alone any time soon. I enjoyed all of the characters in their past and present selves, and I honestly suspected EVERYONE in this book. In addition to the mystery, there is a strong supernatural vibe that I enjoyed.

Santino Fontana perfectly narrates the audiobook. If you loved the audiobook of You by Caroline Kepnes, he narrates that series as well.