122. Home Before Dark – Riley Sager

Is Baneberry Hall haunted? It seems like it should be. It’s got the tragic past going for it – several families and visitors have been injured or died there. And when the Holts move in and really only hear about the latest tragedy, a lot of people’s stuff is in there. They do not last either and end up running out in the middle of the night…which leads to Maggie’s father’s bestselling docudrama book about the family’s experiences there and how super totally haunted Baneberry Hall is. Fully grown Maggie remodels houses and thinks the book is completely bullshit lies and she doesn’t understand why her father would do lie so wholeheartedly about what happened. When he passes away, she finds not only that he still owns Baneberry Hall, but he left it to her, he still pays the original caretaking families to help with it, and he used to come back once a year on the anniversary of them running away.

Maggie has ideas about renovating it, finding out what really happened that she does not remember because she was a traumatized 5 year old when they left, and figuring out what her relationships with her separated parents really are as well. She is also really, really angry about that book that has defined her life and wants to disprove it. And she does figure out what really happened after a lot of strife and interjectings of The Sound of Music soundtrack song about being 16 and being careful. Like a lot of them. Because The Sound of Music record intrudes upon the present time and the inserted book sections from Maggie’s father’s authorial perspective.

As usual with Sager, this reads really quickly and has some twists that are interesting and propulsive. The book within a book works better than that usually does and he skirted my usual issue about researching the house’s past with bound volumes (dusty) at the newspaper office and a vertical file of clippings at the library both in present and past time. I see that small town newspaper and library don’t have great budgets for preservation.

Snuffy would not have been happy about any startling musical intrusions, especially patronizing ones.