Survive the Night ⭑⭑⭑⭒
Genre: Thriller
US Publication: June 29, 2021
Print: 336 pages
Audio: 9 hours 1 minute
Confetti Rating: 3.5 stars
REVIEW:
A Pre-Readers’ Guide to Riley Sager’s latest thriller, Survive the Night:
Picture the absolute stupidest female protagonist you have ever come across in fiction. Do you have her in your mind?
Recall a villain from another book or movie with the most ridiculous motive in the history of stories. Got one, and I mean a reeeaaalllly redonculous one?
Brush up on the terms “unreliable narrator” and “gaslighting.” Are you fired up to see some extreme examples?
Clear your schedule. Did you block off enough time to read this bonkers book all in one sitting?
And there you have it! Survive the Night is a page-turning thriller set in 1991 where the stupidest female protagonist ever decides to do a ride share road trip with a strange man just two months after her best friend was murdered by a serial killer still on the loose. Because she’s such an unreliable narrator, both she AND readers are prime targets for gaslighting, all at the mercy of a cray cray antagonist with a truly laughable agenda.
Despite all that, could I put the darn book down once I started? No.
Have I rated all 5 of Riley Sager’s suspense novels 3 stars now? Yep.
Will I read his next one? 100%.
My thanks go to Hodder & Stoughton for providing a gifted advance readers copy for review via NetGalley.
PUBLISHER 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.