Rating: 4 Stars
Like all hyped books, I thought Final Girls by Riley Sager would be another average read, another book being compared to Gone Girl, another thriller with predictable twists. Thankfully, this time I was wrong. And to be fair, Stephen King didn’t say it was like Gone Girl, he said that if you liked Gone Girl, you will like this book. Which turned out to be pretty accurate as far as I am concerned.
Lisa, Sam and Quincy are popularly known as the Final Girls. It doesn’t matter that they have never met, or that they lead completely different lives, all three of them have one thing in common. They are all the only survivors of different incidents of mass killings; the last ones standing, the girls who lived.
Quincy, the youngest of the Final Girls, has seemingly moved on from the trauma. She lives with her attorney boyfriend, and runs a baking blog. There are things that she keeps hidden from everyone, and a secret dependence on Xanax, but overall, she thinks she is doing fine.
Then comes the news of Lisa’s death in an apparent suicide, and Quincy’s world starts unraveling. She is upset at the way Lisa decided to end her life, and wishes she had tried to meet her at least once. As she struggles with her guilt and grief, Sam turns up on her doorstep unexpectedly, and Quincy is torn between trusting the only other person capable of understanding her demons, or being suspicious of a woman who had previously disappeared from the face of the earth.
When Lisa’s death is ruled a homicide, Quincy is left questioning everything she has ever believed in. Sam’s hold on her life has become stronger, and Quincy can feel herself becoming more and more addicted to her drug of choice. It doesn’t help that she cannot remember what actually happened during the massacre of her friends at Pine Cottage.
Full of twists and surprises, the book also benefits from the unreliability of the narrator. The reader is left guessing, and I for one was completely taken by surprise as the climax was nothing like I imagined. I kept veering from one theory to another all through the book, and couldn’t guess where it was going at all. This, in my eyes, is the best thing about this book.
Definitely a must read for all fans of thrillers.