Title: Lock Every Door
Author: Riley Sager
Version I read: Kindle
Pages: 359
Publisher: Ebury Digital
Publication date: 25th July 2019
Muddled Reader Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½
Story Snapshot…
25-year-old Jules Larsen is lost in life. Having just been made redundant and becoming technically homeless, she is at a crossroads. When a job position comes up apartment sitting in an infamous hotel in New York, she can’t believe her luck. The hotel is featured in her favourite book of all time, a story that she treasures close to her heart. A story that keeps her close to someone no longer in her life. When Jules is offered the position, she finds it hard to believe this is her life! Are things too good to be true?
My Reflection…
This is my third Riley Sager book, and it sits in the middle for me in terms of favourite. What I love about his books is how he cleverly makes the setting a character. The hotel in this book feels real, it comes alive. The gargoyles protecting this mysterious building are given life and became part of Jules’ dreams and participating in her nightmares and her very real complex PTSD. We get to know the setting even more intimately than its human characters.
Our main character, Jules is evidently suffering from trauma in relation to her past. There are undealt emotions with events that have taken place with her parents and her sister, and we get to hear about this a lot throughout the story.
Nothing is as it seems in this slow burning mystery. We meet many of the hotel’s inhabitants and as expected we have no clue who to trust. Things aren’t as they seem as she tries to solve the previous mysteries of the building. Are they just ghost stories or is the hotel cursed?
Jules tells a story of 2 halves. We are in the present, navigating the unnerving Bartholomew with its history of tragedies, missing apartment sitters and strange inhabitants. Whilst Jules reveals bit by bit her history, what happened to her parents and her sister. The 2 stories mix in her world, and we are not too sure what is real and what isn’t.
I didn’t see the twist coming and it was not what I thought at all. Overall, I enjoyed the book and I would recommend if you don’t mind slow burns where a lot of the tension is created in atmosphere rather than action.
I gave this book a solid ⭐⭐⭐½
