#BookReview-‘Lock Every Door’ by Riley Sager

About the book…

You’ve been offered a luxury apartment, rent free.

The catch: you may not live long enough to enjoy it…

No visitors.

No nights spent away from the apartment.

No disturbing the other residents.

These are the only rules for Jules Larson’s new job as apartment sitter for an elusive resident of the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan’s most high-profile private buildings and home to the super rich and famous. Recently heartbroken and practically homeless, Jules accepts the terms, ready to leave her past life behind. Out of place among the extremely wealthy, Jules finds herself pulled toward other apartment sitter Ingrid. But Ingrid confides that the Bartholomew is not what it seems and the dark history hidden beneath its gleaming facade is starting to frighten her. Jules brushes it off as a harmless ghost story – but the next day, her new friend has vanished.

And then Jules discovers that Ingrid is not the first temporary resident to go missing…

Welcome to the Bartholomew…You may never leave.

Published by Ebury Press in hardback, audiobook and ebook formats on the 25th July, this is Riley Sager’s third fiction outing and in this book blogger’s opinion, it’s his best yet!

He took on horror movie tropes of the last girl standing in his debut,‘Final Girls’, the lakeside serial killer in ‘Last Time I Lied’ and now it’s the turn of Ira Levin’s Ira Levin’s seminal classic,’Rosemary’s Baby’ and Adam Nevill’s ‘Appartment 16’

In the gargoyle guarded Bartholemew, appartment sitters come and go, restless because they are young and fickle and go where the wind blows them-or so that is the impression given to Jules, made redundant, cheated on by her boyfriend and now subsequently homeless.

The advert for an appartment sitter (rules are plentiful at The Bartholemew including that none of the flats are left empty,ever) is a godsend, she just has to follow all the rules laid out by the fearsome LEslie Evelyn. No disturbing the other occupants, no visitors(especially overnight) no pictures of the appartments on the web, no telling anyone anything.

She discovers that the eclectic mix of residents includes the author of her favourite novel of all time, ‘The Heart Of A Dreamer’ lives there, a soap opera actress, a handsome doctor and two other appartment sitters, Ingrid and Dylan. Jules is completely alone in the world but desperately needs the money that this job will give her, the isolation is perfect for wound licking and future planning, it all seems too good to be true.

But there is absolutely no trace of the tenant who lived there, no trace of the abruptly departing previous sitter, no one will answer her questions and are they flowers on the wallpaper or faces? Are they staring at her, or screaming, trapped like she is in a house with a dark and mysterious history -her best friend Chloe helpfully sends her this via email! Death has stalked the corridors of the Bartholemew but there haven’t been any for about 40 years, or at least, none that have made the papers…

The appartment’s dumb waiter becomes a method of transporting messages between Jules and Ingrid on the floor below, they don’t have the chance to have many conversations though before Ingrid abruptly vanishes. Jules has already lost both parents to fire, her sister vanished when she was a child so she is not about to give up on Ingrid without a fight. But how can she complete her residency, get the money she desperately needs and find Ingrid without breaking the rules? She has no idea what the consequences of this would be but the longer she spends in appartment 12A, the more she realises they could be fatal…

Switching back and forth between before and after what appears to be an accident that Jules has been involved in, this is a great novel of suspense and horror, with decent scares, so much atmosphere ,nicely padded characters with oodles of details that enrich the story but do not over egg it-George the gargoyle, the afore mentioned wallpaper,these are deft touches!

What was genuinely scary though was how easily a person could disappear-following a conversation with an ex-police chief yesterday on how impossible vanishing in modern society is, it was shocking to realise that for all our ability to track individuals, people can still vanish without a trace and certain sectors of the public are still seen as dispoable. That a person could exist on this earth and vanish leaving nothing behind , sometimes not even loved ones to mourn them really hit home.

‘Lock Every Door’ is a great summer read, a thrilling story of suspense I have no hesitation in recommending. My thanks to Netgalley and Ebury for my gifted ebook ARC of this novel.

About the author…

Riley Sager is the pseudonym of a former journalist, editor and graphic designer who previously published mysteries under his real name.

Now a full-time author, Riley’s first thriller, Final Girls, was a national and international bestseller that has been sold in 25 languages. A film version is being developed by Universal Pictures and Anonymous Content.

A native of Pennsylvania, he now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Links-https://www.rileysagerbooks.com/

https://booksinthefreezer.podbean.com/e/author-interview-riley-sager/

Twitter @riley_sager

@EburyPublishing