september read

The unknown
by riley sager

In 1926, five women disappeared without a trace from a remote island commune on Vermont's Lake Faraday. All that was left behind: five dresses, hung from the branches of an old oak tree, and a diary hinting that something otherworldly took them.

A hundred years later, struggling actress Marin Keane lands the role of a lifetime in a film retelling the mystery — on the condition that she spends a week on the island itself, method-acting her way through the same eerie woods where the women vanished. But once the cameras start rolling, so do the disappearances. Sager weaves between 1926 and today, building a locked-room mystery with a genuinely unsettling supernatural edge — the kind of book you'll want to finish with the lights on.