Lock Every Door - Riley Sager

 

This mystery thriller follows down on her luck Jules after losing her job, boyfriend, and apartment. While job hunting, she answers an ad for an apartment sitter and finds herself in the lobby of one of New York City's most notorious buildings - the Bartholomew. Steeped in history, secrets, and mysterious deaths, the Bartholomew and the residents there would be intriguing to any new resident.  However, the apartment sitter job comes with numerous rules that Jules must follow or risk her job.  Needing the money - $1,000 per week under the table - Jules agrees and soon finds herself befriending another apartment sitter in the building - Ingrid.  One night, Ingrid disappears from the Bartholomew and Jules can't shake the feeling that she didn't just move out - something happened to her.  Following her gut, Jules digs deeper into the history of the building as well as the rumors whispered about events - both past and present - that may be related.  However, searching for answers may open doors that should otherwise stay locked.

I feel like anyone who reads thrillers knows who Riley Sager is.  His books are instant NYT best sellers and the buzz around every new release is staggering and his 5 books combined have over 366 thousand ratings on Goodreads.  I did try to read one of his other books last year, but ended up DNF'ing it so I'll admit I wasn't sure what all the buzz was about.  However, after consistently hearing and seeing his books around (bookstagram, book Twitter, BookTube videos, etc) I was convinced to give another book a try.  I settled on Lock Every Door because it was described by multiple people as different enough from his other books that if you didn't like those then this one might be for you.  After reading this, I have plans to give the rest of his backlist a try (including re-trying the one I DNF'd) so I would agree that this is a good jumping in point for Sager's books. 

My favorite part of this book was the Bartholomew as a setting.  An old apartment building that only the richest of the rich can afford to live in and with tons of gargoyles? Yes please!  This story has that really great atmospheric haunted house vibes that I love in my gothic-y mysteries.  I thought the Bartholomew was a great example of a setting that is also a character because there is so much personality and history given to the building.  Sager's descriptions, while a little heavy handed for my personal liking, were really great at emphasizing this point (faces in the patterns of the wallpaper, for example).  Since most of the story is following Jules as she looks into the building's history and walks around to talk to some of the residents, we get a lot of description of the building.  I really enjoyed Jules's observations about the building as well because there's a lot that could be brushed off as 'rich people being eccentric' but she finds really off putting and almost eerie.  It reminded me a lot of when one of those super big mansions with the weird decor goes up for sale and the zillow listing starts making the rounds around social media.  

I really liked the character work in this and found Jules as well as all the residents she meets really well developed.   This is very much a fish-out-of-water story with Jules being initially very enamored with the Bartholomew because it is the setting of her favorite book.  I also liked how she initially shrugged off her friend's concerns and rumors that the building is haunted or at least very creepy only to later have the rose-tinted glasses removed as her investigation into Ingrid's disappearance deepens.  I really liked how we would get snippets of the other resident's histories though her brief interactions with them rather than getting some big info-dump of all the famous people living in the building.  I do wish we would have gotten some more development in the relationship between Jules and her best friend Chloe as well as Jules and Ingrid.  I could see that Sager was trying to link Ingrid to Jules's missing sister (as it says in the summary) but I didn't 100% buy into that.  I think we needed more of an extended friendship with them before I could really get on board with Jules spending so much of her time and energy looking for Ingrid.  Same with her relationship with Chloe.  We get a little bit of their interactions, but since Chloe was absent through most of the investigation portion of the book I didn't get enough of their relationship to really see them as best friends. 

I thought the structure of the book was interesting but I think it ended up weakening one of the later reveals. I love a good dual timeline and in this case we get Jules as she is brought to a hospital after getting hit by a car and then jump back a week prior to follow her journey into the Bartholomew.  We would get a few chapters in the past timeline before jumping back to the present in the hospital and besides the initial shock of her reaction, I didn't feel like the time jumps really added anything to the story.  When we finally catch up to the car accident in the past timeline and the plot twist that comes along with it, I really felt like it would have had more of an impact on me if we didn't know about the accident until it happened.  I really like dual timelines in most mystery/thrillers because it usually adds tension or some depth to the plot.  However, in this case, I didn't feel like the dual times did really anything to heighten the plot above what it would have been if it was just written chronologically.  I was glad that we didn't get a ton of chapters from the hospital timeline but every time it would come up, I just found myself annoyed that it was breaking up the intriguing investigation plot with boring hospital plot. 

The investigation reveals and thriller twists were a little hit and miss for me.  I thought the investigation was really well paced and there were enough breadcrumbs to follow through.  I didn't get put off by any sort of miraculous coincidences that sometimes come up in mystery books.  I do wish Jules had an investigation buddy or someone to bounce ideas off of because there were a few times where I felt the pacing of the overall narrative dragged because it was just a whole lot of Jules reading and not much else going on.  I think her reading those articles was important and the information was interesting, but I wish she was reading them with someone else so there could be a little bit of dialogue or something to break up the narrative a little.  While I really liked the final twist and reveal of what is happening with the Bartholomew, I did find it a little disappointing.  This is 100% a personal preference but I was thinking the story was heading Path A (and I think Sager wants all readers to think it is heading down that path) but then the big reveal is that it is something a little more grounded than Path A but arguably just as incredible.  This 'walking back' of sorts that the ending does reminded me a lot of how Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson had me thinking we were going in one direction but the truth turned out to be a little less spectacular than I was expecting.  It felt very Scooby-Doo where the mask gets pulled off the bad guy at the end and while the bad guy is still a bad guy and is doing bad things, there's a bit of a let down that it wasn't a swamp monster haunting the amusement park.  And as much as the ending was very appropriate and very earned, I really wanted the swamp monster to be real.

Overall, I really enjoyed this story and I'm glad I gave Sager another shot after DNF'ing the first book I tried from him.  I think this is a really solid gothic mystery thriller with interesting characters and a great setting.  I did find some character relationships a little lacking and the overall reveal a little bit of a let down but it didn't really damper my overall enjoyment of the book.