Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Final Girls is only the third Riley Sager book I’ve read, but it is definitely my favorite so far. SO many twists and turns, and every time I thought I knew what was going to happen, the direction changed again! I can’t believe I waited this long to read it. It’s an international best seller and won Best Hardcover Novel in the 2018 International Thriller Writer Awards.

Quincy Carpenter is a Final Girl, the only person to survive a brutal massacre of her friends. But she’s not the only one, there are other Final Girls out there. But when one of the other girls dies Quincy is thrown back into the media spotlight and is forced to face her horrible past. There’s no pretending everything is normal now.

It’s hard to say more about this book without giving away spoilers, so I’ll just say that I loved it. Too often I guess at the ending early on in thrillers, so the fact that I didn’t work this one out is a real plus in my books. It’s horrifying and a bit gory, and will have you on the edge of your seat for sure.

Potential triggers include child abuse, mental health issues, homelessness, graphic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, and eating disorders.

I read part of it and listened to the rest on audiobook, which was fantastically narrated by Erin Bennett and Hillary Huber. The audiobook is just under 12 and a half hours long, but it felt to me like it flew by! If you’d like to listen to it, you can get the audio here, or grab the physical book by clicking the button below.

Synopsis:

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five 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. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.

Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.

That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.