Home Before Dark by Riley Sager is a straightforward pseudo thriller with a promising premise. The story follows Maggie Holt, the daughter of a deceased author who found success by writing about the haunting of an old home the family had bought.

His book, House of Horrors: A True Story, is about an old Vermont estate called Baneberry Hall. Home Before Dark alternates between the father’s memoir and Maggie’s return to the estate after her father dies. Maggie, who has been told all of her life to stay from the Baneberry, has no recollection of her brief childhood there. Instead, she relies only on what her father wrote in the book, which she considers made-up nonsense.

Except, Baneberry is not a house of horrors. It’s the setting for what amounts to a Saturday afternoon, made-for-television Scooby-Do mystery, which is what even Sager calls it at one point in the book. The result is a story that tells us it will be spooky. Still, it never really delivers anything that suspenseful or scary because we know, as readers, that this feels more Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys mystery than Amityville Horror.

There is nothing wrong with that when you know it going in. Maggie has a mystery to solve at Baneberry, and it has much more to do with her family’s legacy of dumbness than ghosts. Read it for the interesting twists between what her father wrote in his book and the truths she confronts as an adult. Forgive the occasional clunky simile (nobody looks like Cujo when they brush their teeth unless they’re a slob or cartoon, which Maggie’s mother is neither).

If there is any other takeaway that the book delivers, let it be that parents should be a bit more careful in believing their children. It’s the ones who don’t believe them that mess up their lives and everybody around them.