Lock Every Door

Jules Larsen, the 25-year-old heroine of this compulsively readable thriller from bestseller Sager (The Last Time I Lied), has hit rock bottom. Scarred by the deaths of her parents and the disappearance of her sister years before, she has recently lost her administrative assistant job and learned that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. With her finances perilously low, Jules responds to an ad for a house sitter at a Manhattan luxury apartment building, which turns out to be the Bartholomew, the setting for her favorite book, a bestselling novel published in the ’80s about a 20-year-old orphan who lives there. In order to earn $12,000 for living in one of the Bartholomew’s vacant apartments for three months, she must follow strict rules, which include absolutely no visitors and refraining from interacting with the other residents. Jules leaps at the opportunity, only to learn that the property is rumored to be haunted and that her acceptance of the job may be placing her in jeopardy. Fans of Ira Levin, to whom the book is dedicated, will be delighted by Sager’s clever variation on a typical Levin plot. [em]Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management. (July) [/em]