Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy.  Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them.  For this week’s Waiting on Wednesday, I highlight an excellent upcoming thriller with the cool sounding novel, The Unknown by Riley Sager.

Amazon

Readers of this blog will know that I’m always on the lookout for fun thrillers with interesting or unique twists to them, and one of the more awesome sounding thrillers coming out in 2026 is The Unknown.  Written by acclaimed thriller author Riley Sager (a pseudonym of Todd Ritter), The Unknown is set for release in August later this year and has a deeply intriguing narrative about a mysterious island with long buried secrets and a group of actors who are about to experience its horrors for themselves.

Plot Synopsis:

In 1926, five women disappeared from a remote island in Vermont. Now, one hundred years later, it’s happening again.

Struggling actress Marin Keane is shocked when she lands a role in a major motion picture about the unsolved mystery of New Avalon, an island on sprawling Lake Faraday in Vermont. She’s even more surprised when she learns that the role requires a weeklong research trip to that very spot.

Because New Avalon isn’t your ordinary island. A century ago, it was a commune for spiritual mediums-until they all vanished in 1926. The only trace of them was five dresses hanging from the branches of an old oak tree in the middle of the island, one for each missing woman. Some locals say they simply left. Others think they were murdered. But the prevailing opinion, thanks to a diary left behind by one of the vanished, a young woman named Daisy Rue, is that a séance gone wrong conjured something supernatural that took them all one by one.

Not long after arriving, Marin and her castmates, including legendary actress Violet Wright and white-hot director Ronan Peters, begin to realize all is not right with New Avalon. They hear strange noises in the night and notice mysterious symbols left behind by the island’s previous occupants. And after a sudden health emergency leaves Marin, Ronan, and the other actors stranded on the island, the disappearances begin again.

Is it the work of someone trying to derail the movie? Or is the island’s alleged supernatural past catching up with the present? As fear and suspicion mount, Marin turns to Daisy’s diary, hoping it holds the key to figuring out what really happened to the women of New Avalon-and how to keep the island’s terrible history from repeating itself.

I love the sound of this upcoming thriller, and frankly I think it’s going to be a very outstanding read, especially as Sager looks set to combine horror elements with his usual thriller style.  I’m getting some The Blair Witch Project vibes from the above plot, and its going to be very interesting to see if the evil stalking the main characters is a mundane evil, or something more supernatural.  It will also be quite interesting to see how the secrets of the island’s history come into play with The Unknown’s main story, and you have to imagine that Sager will work in some entertaining connections that are going to be amazing to explore.

Overall, I think that The Unknown is going to be a particularly amazing thriller, and I am extremely keen to get my ands on it later this year.  The cool plot above sounds so damn fun, and I cannot wait to see how weird and twisted things get on New Avalon.