Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Dutton Books for gifting me a review copy of Survive the Night by Riley Sager. This is my third Sager book so far, and he really does manage to get me every time.

Lately, every time I read a thriller I guess at the killer really early on in the book, which takes some of the excitement out of it. But Sager always keeps me guessing until the end, which I appreciate.

It’s the early ‘90s and Charlie Jordan’s roommate and friend has been murdered by a serial killer. She just can’t stay at school anymore and is trying to find a ride back to her hometown. While putting up a flyer on a ride-share noticeboard she meets Josh, who’s heading her way. So they agree to split the gas and go together. But the more time they spend together in the car the more Charlie is convinced that Josh is actually the serial killer. There’s just one problem…Charlie isn’t sure what’s real and what she’s imagining any more.

A big chunk of the book takes place in the car, and I will admit I found it a little slow to get into at first. That could also have something to do with me not generally enjoying unreliable narrators and there is a lot of ‘is Charlie unreliable or isn’t she’ going on, to begin with.

My only other complaint is that Sager doesn’t seem to have ever driven a stick shift, or at least not recently enough to remember how it’s done. He kept saying things like Josh went up a gear to get up the big hill. I used to drive for a living, and have owned more manual gearboxes than automatics in my life, so I can tell you that’s not how gearboxes work, and if he kept going up gears he’d end up rolling back down that big hill. I know, that’s such a minor grievance, but little things like that really bug me in books because they pull me out of the story. To be fair I was reading an ARC so perhaps those mentions have been fixed in the final version.

Otherwise, once I got into the story I was completely hooked and basically binged it in a day. I did not see the two big main twists coming at all, which was delightful. The story is mostly told from Charlie’s point of view, but there are a couple of chapters thrown in to give you a little taste of what’s going through Josh’s mind too. At one point I was so wrapped up in the story, and at a very intense part of it, that I didn’t hear my husband come home. So, when he walked into the room I literally jumped, and maybe screamed a little. Don’t worry, my heart rate eventually returned to normal.

In short, if you’re a thriller-lover I definitely recommend you get your hands on this one!

Synopsis:

It's November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana's in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.

Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it's guilt and grief over the 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. Like the Hitchcock heroine she's named after, Charlie has her doubts. There's something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn't seem to want Charlie to see inside the car's trunk. As they travel an empty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly worried Charlie begins to think she's sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie's suspicion merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?

What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse played out on night-shrouded roads and in neon-lit parking lots, during an age when the only call for help can be made on a pay phone and in a place where there's nowhere to run. In order to win, Charlie must do one thing--survive the night.