There are a few things you can count on every year. Birthdays. Taxes. And for the last decade, a new Riley Sager thriller.
It's been ten years since Sager released his breakout novel Final Girls, and every year since, he's managed to deliver another original standalone thriller. That's a pretty impressive streak. I haven't read all of them, and I certainly haven't loved every one I've read, but I've enjoyed enough to keep finding an excuse to pick up another. So when The Unknown arrived this year, I was curious to see what Sager had come up with this time.
Marin Keane is a fish out of water if there ever was one. She's landed a last-minute spot in the cast of self-proclaimed "method director" Ronan Peters's latest film. The cast is stacked, including perennial awards darling Violet Wright. Marin is pinching herself at the opportunity to work alongside actors of this caliber. She's even willing to overlook the peculiar circumstances surrounding the production. Anything to rid herself of her only other acting credit, girl with a rash.
Those peculiar circumstances bring Marin and the rest of the cast to New Avalon, an island on sprawling Lake Faraday in Vermont. Nearly a century ago, five women disappeared there without a trace. Now Ronan is making a movie about them, and in the name of "research," he's brought the actresses playing those women to the very place where they vanished.
Marin has been cast as Daisy Rue, one of the five missing women and the only one to leave behind an account of what happened. Her diary details the increasingly strange events leading up to their disappearance. There's talk of a séance. A spirit. The women being picked off one by one. Exactly what happened on New Avalon in 1926 is anyone's guess, but Ronan wants his cast to immerse themselves in the mystery.
Maybe a little too much.
With Ronan pushing for complete authenticity, Marin and the others settle in for a week on New Avalon. It's isolated, steeped in a century's worth of rumors, and just creepy enough to make Daisy's diary difficult to dismiss. As the week gets underway, Marin begins to wonder how much of the story she's been hired to reenact is actually true.
With The Unknown, Riley Sager once again shows why he's become such a reliable presence in the mystery/thriller genre. The story shifts between Marin's week on New Avalon and the actual diary entries Daisy wrote nearly a century earlier. I really enjoyed the way those two threads played off each other, with each new piece of Daisy's story changing how I viewed what Marin was experiencing in the present. It kept me questioning exactly what happened on this island all those years ago and what, if anything, it meant for the women there now.
There's more going on with Marin than just the mystery, too. Sager uses her experiences to explore some of the uglier sides of the film industry, especially what can happen when someone desperate for their big break suddenly finds themselves surrounded by people with far more power than they have. That gave me something to latch onto with Marin beyond simply wanting to know what was happening on the island.
Not everything worked for me. The latter portion of the novel began to lose some of the momentum that made the earlier chapters so difficult to put down, and I found myself a little less invested as it went along. But Sager still had a few surprises waiting for me. By the time everything came together, I was back on board.
The Unknown probably won't go down as my favorite Riley Sager novel, but I had a good time reading it. And after ten books in ten years, I'm still curious to see what Sager comes up with next.
Bring on book eleven.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2026, 75)
I do like Riley Sager, those his books have been a bit hit and miss. Sounds like this one leans more toward the hit side of the equation. And I love the premise. Plus, remote isolated settings are some of my favs. Putting this one on my list. :D
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