Middle of the Night (novel)
2024 novel by Todd Ritter as Riley Sager
Middle of the Night is a 2024 psychological thriller novel by Riley Sager. The book follows Ethan Marsh, who returns to his childhood home and is haunted by the disappearance of his best friend Billy decades ago during a backyard sleepover.
Plot
In July 1994, 10-year-old Ethan Marsh lives in the Hemlock Circle cul-de-sac in Princeton, New Jersey. One day, Ethan and his best friend Billy Barringer explore the grounds of the nearby Hawthorne Institute, a parapsychological research facility founded by the eccentric Ezra Hawthorne. They are joined by another friend Russ as well as Ragesh and Ethan's babysitter Ashley, two neighborhood teenagers.
Ragesh locks Billy, Ethan, and Russ inside the institute's mausoleum as a prank. Ethan and Russ escape but abandon Billy, who is caught by institute staff. Billy is taken to see Ezra Hawthorne, and the two converse about ghosts, one of Billy's interests.
That night, Ethan and Billy are camping in Ethan's backyard; the boys fight about Billy's belief in ghosts. When Ethan wakes up, he discovers that the tent has been sliced open and Billy is missing.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Middle of the Night (novel)” as 2024 novel by Todd Ritter as Riley Sager. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2024 novel by Todd Ritter as Riley Sager. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q135177846. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2024 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Middle of the Night (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.