Riley Sager is the pen name of Todd Ritter, an American thriller writer from Pennsylvania whose novels include “Final Girls”, “Lock Every Door”, “Home Before Dark” and “The Only One Left”. He has published ten novels under the name since 2017, all of them standalone stories.
Before writing fiction full time, Ritter worked as a journalist, editor and graphic designer. He first published under his own name: three mysteries in the Kat Campbell series, beginning with “Death Notice” in 2010. “Things Half in Shadow”, a historical novel about spiritualism in Philadelphia after the Civil War, followed in 2014 under a second pseudonym, Alan Finn.
“Final Girls” (2017) was the first Riley Sager book and won the International Thriller Writers Award for best hardcover novel in 2018. The gender-neutral pen name drew press attention at the time, with The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal both reporting on it, and his website at first carried no author photograph. Ritter has said that a new name offered publishers an author with a clean slate rather than one with a patchy sales record.
A Sager novel has appeared every year since. “Lock Every Door” (2019) concerns an apartment sitter in an exclusive Manhattan building whose predecessor has vanished. “Home Before Dark” (2020) is a haunted house story told partly through extracts from a book within the book, and takes some of its inspiration from “The Amityville Horror”. “The House Across the Lake” (2022) is set at a Vermont lake, and “The Only One Left” (2023) follows a carer looking after an elderly woman accused decades earlier of murdering her family.
Several of the books have been optioned for the screen: Universal bought the film rights to “Final Girls” in 2017, and a television series of “Lock Every Door” was announced at Paramount Television in 2019. According to his website, the novels have been published in 40 countries and have sold more than five million copies.
His most recent novel, “The Unknown” (2026), sends an actress to a Vermont island where a commune of spiritual mediums disappeared in 1926. Sager lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Things Half in Shadow (As: Alan Finn) | 2014 |
| Final Girls | 2017 |
| The Last Time I Lied | 2018 |
| Lock Every Door | 2019 |
| Home Before Dark | 2020 |
| Survive the Night | 2021 |
| The House Across the Lake | 2022 |
| The Only One Left | 2023 |
| Middle of the Night | 2024 |
| With a Vengeance | 2025 |
| The Unknown | 2026 |
Publication Order of Kat Campbell Books
| Death Notice (As: Todd Ritter) | 2010 |
| Bad Moon / Death Falls (As: Todd Ritter) | 2011 |
| Devil’s Night / Death Night (As: Todd Ritter) | 2013 |