Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with fie friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to - a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls.

This book was a wild ride from start to finish. I’ve only read one Riley Sager book in the past so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Apparently supernatural elements are somewhat common for this author which I didn’t know so I was very unsure what to expect with this book. The beginning did grind my gears a bit. The traumatized single woman with a drinking problem who doubts what they see and spies on their neighbours is a little bit OVERDONE at this point in time. Having that trope shoved in my face right off the bat made me feel like this book would be too similar to others with the same trope and that I wouldn’t enjoy it. But I stuck with it and I’m glad I did because, even though the main character was generic, the plot was different enough from anything I’d read that it kept me hooked.

Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at a campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, its guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father - or so he says.

The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t want her to see inside the trunk. as they travel an empty, twisty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly anxious Charlie begins to think she’s sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie’s jittery mistrust merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?

One thing is certain - Charlie has nowhere to run and no way to call for help. Trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on pitch-black roads and in neon-lit parking lots, Charlie knows the only way to win is to survive the night.