Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) - 📘📘📘📘📘
Genre - Psychological Thriller, Ghost Thriller, Horror
Format - Hardcover
Length - 384 pages


*Amazon Blurb*

What was it like? Living in that house.
Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.
Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father's book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father's death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.
Alternating between Maggie’s uneasy homecoming and chapters from her father’s book, Home Before Dark is the story of a house with long-buried secrets and a woman’s quest to uncover them—even if the truth is far more terrifying than any haunting.

*My Review* 

 

If you've been keeping up with my blog then you'll know that suspense/thriller/horror are my favorite types of books. When someone asks what my favorite book is, I'll ask them what genre because it's different for each. This book.... OMG .....seriously! This is my favorite horror/thriller book of all time right now. I couldn't read it fast enough.

I enjoyed how it went back and forth from what Maggie's dad wrote in his book to her current situation. I couldn't tell if the house was really haunted, who the ghosts were or what. It seemed like every chapter held a surprise that I hadn't been expecting. There were a few times that I thought I knew what someone was up to or who "did what", only to be thrown off by the next chapter. I was reading so fast that sometimes I didn't have time to make a guess, nor did I want to. I just wanted to get to the end to have it all make sense. And WOW did it ever. It's not until the very end and I was totally shocked.

Storm of Secrets by Loretta Marion

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) - 📘📘📘📘
Genre - Ghost Thriller, Ghost Mysteries, Amateur Sleuth
Format - Hardcover
Length - 327 pages


*Amazon Blurb*

A powerful storm descends upon Cape Cod's Whale Rock at the peak of tourist season--and the weekend Cassandra Mitchell's and Daniel Benjamin's wedding is set to take place at The Bluffs, the magnificent Victorian mansion Cassie inherited from her family. In the wake of the storm's destruction, three-year-old Lucas Kleister goes missing--and the body of small-time drug dealer Lee Chambers is found in a restaurant dumpster. Now, the WRPD are faced with a murder to solve, a missing child to find, and the aftermath of one of the worst storms in recent memory.

While aiding with the clean-up and helping the displaced, Cassie has been receiving cryptic messages from the spirits of her great-grandparents, Percy and Celeste Mitchell, the original residents of The Bluffs. At first, the messages are benign, but soon, they begin to point to something more sinister. As Cassie works to decipher their meaning, the specter of a mysterious local legend surfaces. The tale of Barnacle Boy--and what happened to him during another destructive storm decades earlier--will weave through the desperate search to find Lucas and the identity of the killer.

*My Review* 

The Bluffs mysteries continue. It seems like this place is just asking to be the center of attention. There was so much going on in this story. It wasn't just one mystery, but a few of them and I did get a little confused at times with all the different characters and keeping track of which mystery they went with. I did find myself getting annoyed with Cassie at times for not taking a stand with her sister and for putting herself in what could be harms way. Granted without her doing so, the mystery may have been unsolved.

My favorite part was the ending of "The Lost Boy". I won't say anymore about that since I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

Regardless of my slight confusion, Storm of Secrets is another wonderful book by Loretta Marion. I did enjoy the first much more, but I look forward to reading more of her work.