lock every door review // my first riley sager book!

Hi friends! I’m here to review a book I kinda binged on the beach…and it was an adult thriller. You read that right, I’m finally branching away from the YA genre*!

*lol mostly so y’all don’t have to hear me complain about 99% of the ya thrillers i read

TW: Suicide, murder, graphic description of disease and surgery, disappearances of loved ones

Basically, this is about a girl named Jules who is invited to apartment-sit for a fancy apartment, but her new neighbors are a little…sketchy. That’s the bare bones of the premise but I didn’t want to give too much information because I know a lot of people like to go into their thrillers as blind as possible!

Riley Sager is a popular author in the thriller genre. So, when I was picking out an audiobook forn the beach, I went with the only available Sager book the library had. And um…I kinda listened to it in two days*.

meanwhile it sometimes takes me 20 days to listen to a book…smh

so, what did i like???

• Sager’s writing didn’t scare me at all. He somehow managed to make it thrilling, suspenseful, heart-pounding, but never downright terrifying. The cover is scarier than the book.
• Jules is an excellent main character. She’s loyal, and her background allows the rather extremely unbelievable premise to only become slightly unbelievable. I liked that we got to slowly know her story. It made certain scenes hit a little harder.
• I actually really loved Jules’s interactions with the other characters. Most of them were surprisingly three-dimensional, and I especially liked Ingrid and Dylan and Chloe.

Okay. Now it’s time for me to attempt to articulate my feelings about the plot without being accidentally spoilery. This is a rather interesting book, in that most of the suspense comes from the characters. I wasn’t totally, 100% on the edge of my seat but I was invested nonetheless. I appreciated the pace of the plot, since me and my criminally short attention span were never actually bored. But this does feel like a beach read, never too heavy.

okay but the ending.

I didn’t really see it coming? But it also wasn’t shocking or surprising? I’m not entirely sure how to explain it. It felt like a bit of a let-down, turning a mystery-thriller into more of a straight thriller.

Overall, this was a good book and a fantastic beach read! But I never felt totally invested, and this isn’t the most memorable thing ever. Plus the ending disappointed me just a bit, so this is a definite 3.5 star book. I don’t regret reading it at all though! Tell me: have you read a Riley Sager book?

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