This thriller follows multiple people in the small town of Slayton. A family massacre at Blackhall Manor rocked the town 25 years earlier and the building has stood abandoned ever since. Halloween night 2019 - a group of girls sneak away and meet at Blackhall Manor to play the Midnight Game: where they light candles and invite the Midnight Man to come into the house and then evade him and keep their candles lit until morning. However, one of the girls never returns home. Police detective Sarah Noble has just returned to duty after a scandal and in her investigation into the disappearance of the girl Sarah finds older and more sinister truths are ready to be revealed whether she likes it or not.
TW/CW: child death, child sexual abuse, grooming, religious abuse, weight/food talk, PTSD, suicide
The main part of the blurb that really grabbed my attention was the Midnight Game and what an interesting layer to a thriller that would be. I've never heard of the Midnight Game until this book, but where I grew up people would play Bloody Mary which is a similar enough concept that I was onboard with this concept. I loved that we get the game from the perspective of these 14ish year old girls who initially don't entirely believe but as they start to play the game, their imaginations get the better of them and by the end of the night, they pretty much believe the Midnight Man is real. Because of these children, there was a part of me who also questioned if the Midnight Man was real and if this thriller would go off in a supernatural direction. I also enjoyed how the lore of the Midnight Man was a thread through the whole story, not just a brief kick-off point in the beginning. We do get a few chapters from the various children in the book and they didn't exactly, to me, read as young as they should have (I know this is a pretty common issue in many books but I still wanted to give it a brief mention) and it did break my immersion a tiny amount.
We do alternate POV between a few characters but Sarah, the police detective, is who I would call our protagonist. The other POVs really exist to give the reader extra details that Sarah doesn't know yet - they don't really have their own plot lines in the way some multi-POV thrillers do. This does help increase the tension and pacing in the book because the reader is getting the juicy tidbits early on and then we get to see how/if Sarah finds out about that same information. I think the multi-POV also did help give the reader a better sense of the town as a whole and what some of the different struggles people face while living there. These other POV scenes were usually pretty short which was good so that we didn't lose track of the main narrative thread with Sarah. Small town secrets are one of my favorite thriller tropes and Mitchell does a great job of giving us a good amount of secrets that may or may not be related to the case at hand. This is the first book in a new series called Slayton Thrillers and it seems like Sarah may be the recurring character in that series (but I couldn't find any other details about future books at this time).
I really enjoyed the character development we saw with Sarah. She's coming back to work after almost a year away due to a scandal and resulting mental health issues. There's some animosity from a few of her coworkers and she isn't sure if she made the right decision. Through the investigation, she is able to reconnect with some friends she knew from school which seemed to ground her in this new time in her life and give her the stability she needed in order to work through the issues she's facing at work. As I mentioned above, this is the first book in a new series. However, there were times where some mentions were made about the scandal and Sarah's absence that were phrased in a way that made me think I should know what they're referring to. I think I got this feeling because pretty much everyone in this town knows about the scandal so they don't need to spell it out on page and thus their little knowing side remarks are vague enough to be mysterious but specific enough that other characters know what they're talking about. We do, around the 70% mark, find out what the scandal exactly was and that does show us a new side of Sarah but I wish the reader could have been in on the news earlier in the book and see Sarah overcome these whispers. I do hope we see some of the characters in this book show up in later books, even just as brief mentions because I think Mitchell did a good job at really endearing these characters to the reader (even if the characters weren't entirely likeable).
The investigation and reveals were great - all the way until the ending. Literally during the first 85% of the book, it was a 5 star read for me. I really loved the way Sarah's investigation wove through the town and how the other character POVs were integrated in that. We got a lot of secrets revealed and some of those reveals ended up being directly related to the current case. I thought the investigation was logical but not overly-dry like some detective thrillers can be. There was good tension building throughout the whole book, especially with the POV choices and how certain information was revealed. There were so many times where I was sure it was X and then the plot would take what I was thinking and twist it just enough to be something new entirely that I didn't see coming. There was a fantastic build up and escalation of events leading up to the ending and I was expecting a big twisty reveal ... but I disappointed. So I wouldn't say the ending was bad, but I was disappointed enough to knock down a whole star. I don't feel like the reveal was hinted about at all during the rest of the book so it felt like it came a little out of left field. Looking back, there were a number of characters who would have known parts of the reveal but they never spoke about those aspects on page so the reader didn't have any breadcrumbs to follow. I generally don't like these kind of blind-gotcha endings because it just feels like it almost cheapens the reading experience for me. I love reading thrillers partly because of the guessing game and trying to put the pieces together so with no crumbs to follow, I'm overall left disappointed. Also, the ending was pretty anti-climatic as far as pacing goes. We get a villain monologue (which I think is necessary given the lack of breadcrumbs for the reader to follow) and then it is pretty much done in just a few pages. Given the way the last few chapters are written, the ending reveal obviously impacts the characters greatly but as the reader, I didn't feel any emotional connection to the reveal because of the lack of foundation in the earlier story. All that aside, the ending did tie up all the loose ends and answer the questions I had up to that point so it was satisfying from that perspective.
Overall, I really enjoyed the story and I would love to read more thriller/horror stories involving the spooky games kids play at sleepovers. I thought this was a really good introduction to a new series and I hope we get to see some of the characters from this book as the series progresses. I was disappointed by the lack of breadcrumbs for the ending, but it did tie everything together so I can't be too mad about it.
Thanks to NetGalley and Embla Books for the ARC in exchange for review
Expected publication date is October 13, 2021.
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