So, as I generally point out once a year when the Riley Sager pseudonym publishes a new volume, these improve with every iteration, even if they tend to recycle concepts.
In Middle of the Night, we're dealing with 40 year old Ethan returning to the Hemlock Circle cul-de-sac in the middle of New Jersey outside Princeton. With one exception, all of the houses on the circle are occupied by the same families who lived there 30 years ago when Ethan's best friend vanished from a tent in Ethan's backyard and never reappeared. Ethan is separated from his wife, and living at the house he grew up in as his mom and dad have moved to Florida. Ethan is plagued by recurring nightmares of the sound of someone slitting the side of the tent.
Throughout the novel, we get flashbacks (from other character's perspectives, even) chronicling the 24 hours prior to Billy vanishing, showing how none of the kids or adults in the Circle are particularly honest about anything going on 30 years prior. We have Russ, in the past the younger brother of one of the neighborhood bullies who OD'd/committed suicide, in the present he runs a sporting goods store; we have Angela, Ethan's former babysitter who's now home watching over her dementia ridden dad with her10 year old son; we have Ragesh, also a bully in the past who's now a cop with a husband. We have the usual strange and mysterious in the Hawthorne Institute, now a State Park.
While this being Sager does mean we get 4 or 5 major twists as we get towards the end, this time they're better paced so the reader can actually absorb and react to them before the next one springs. We also get a throw away reference to both Final Girls and The Last Time I Lied, thus giving us a fairly unconnected shared universe.
Honestly, this is probably the best the author has achieved, and I found myself enjoying it, even as I wondered how certain facts were overlooked in the past.
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