Sometimes, the people we know inflict upon us the very worst pain we will ever have. This is the truth at the heart of Middle of the Night, Riley Sager’s latest mystery/thriller. A tale of friendship, youth, and lost hope, it examines how ordinary humans can hide some pretty dark secrets.

It was a case that would shock the nation and be the subject of websites for decades, but its origins are entirely ordinary. It is a typical quiet Friday night in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood, with the only ‘excitement’ taking place in ten-year-old Ethan Marsh’s backyard. He and his best friend Billy are doing their weekly campout on the lawn, just a few hundred feet away from either set of their parents. They fall asleep side by side, but Ethan wakes up alone the next morning. Confusion quickly turns to fear as Ethan learns Billy didn’t just go home early but has literally disappeared. The only hint to what might have happened is a large slice in the side of the tent.

Thirty years later, Ethan tries to move forward by heading backward. After the dissolution of his life due to a series of crises, he reluctantly agrees to return to his childhood home while his parents take up residency in Florida. A high school teacher by profession, he has the summer to settle in before taking up his new position at a private academy in the area. Suffering from bad dreams and insomnia since that horrible night in his childhood, he is wide awake and staring out the window when he first notices odd happenings in the nocturnal hours. Someone seems to be deliberately tripping the security lights in the cul-de-sac long after everyone should be in bed – someone who manages to both trigger the sensors and yet avoid the radiant light they generate. When Ethan goes outside to investigate, he is confident that he feels Billy’s presence. Is Billy, long thought dead, actually alive and roaming the streets? Or has another soul, the one behind Billy’s disappearance, returned to the scene of the crime?

These thoughts plague Ethan, but just as he tries to decide what to do about them, a discovery is made. Billy’s body is found on the grounds of an establishment not two miles from Ethan’s backyard. As the police once more start questioning the area’s residents, Ethan determines to find out for himself what happened that long ago July. He has picked an opportune moment to do so. Three other former denizens of Hemlock Circle have also returned, ostensibly to care for aging family members, but Ethan can’t help but see fate’s hand in it all. Have unseen forces drawn the four of them here just as Billy’s resting place has been revealed? His quest will pull apart families, destroy close friendships, and reveal the secrets of the mysterious institute that did bizarre, clandestine research just a few short miles from the small group of houses that served as a kind of mundane temple to upper-crust suburbia.

Like any good mystery, Middle of the Night is a layered tale. We begin by scrutinizing what everyone claimed happened and then slowly revealing what actually occurred. What the author does extremely well here is show us how human lives lived in close proximity can be like a stack of dominos. Person A, doing thing B, causes Person C to do thing D, and so on. The end result is something no one could possibly have predicted. I also appreciated that none of them are psychotic or particularly bizarre. Each one of our characters is just trying to come to terms with who they are, who they want to be, and how they want to live their lives. The suffocating nature of suburban expectations meeting human banality receives a good exploration. And the author absolutely nails the typical suburban personalities that you’d encounter in these neighborhoods and what their average interactions are like.

Ethan is a great character to lead us on our journey of discovery. He’s middle-aged, average, pedantic. Intelligent but not brilliant or especially gifted. He is an everyman who just wants to resolve a problem that has haunted him for years. The steps he takes to achieve this end are small and seem almost inadequate, but ultimately, they are enough to reveal just what happened and why. The reader is also treated to Billy’s perspective of the events, giving the story a fuller and more satisfying sense of closure.

The book does have some issues which keep it from DIK status. The main one is that the tale, especially the portions surrounding Ethan’s mom and her job, are anachronistic. It would have been appropriate in a woman of the 1970s, or perhaps the early 1980s, but for the 1990s her attitudes feel jarringly out of place. In fact, the whole narrative feels a bit that way, as if the story is taking place in a time warp in an America transplanted from the sixties into the nineties.

The police investigation also feels off. Given the scope of what is described – with the case being handled by multiple agencies, including the FBI – it seemed to me that many aspects of how it was managed simply wouldn’t have happened. That the secrets were kept, even under repeated questioning by numerous people, also feels unrealistic.

My final quibble is that the resolution is a bit schmaltzy. It’s too sweet, given how things played out and the newness of the relationship between the two who wind up building a life together.

Those mishaps keep Middle of the Night from being Grade A reading material, but those who enjoy low-key domestic thrillers will still find a lot to love in this one. I’d recommend it to that audience.