Final Girls by Riley Sager #BookReview

What’s it about?

Each girl survived an unthinkable horror. Now someone wants them dead…

They were the victims of separate massacres. Grouped together by the press, and dubbed the Final Girls, they are treated like something fresh out of a slasher movie.

When something terrible happens to Lisa, put-together Quincy and volatile Sam finally meet. Each one influences the other. Each one has dark secrets. And after the bloodstained fingers of the past reach into the present, each one will never be the same.

You can buy a copy of this novel on Amazon UK | Amazon US.

Review

If this eye-catching cover doesn’t get your attention immediately, I don’t know what will. I’m totally loving those pink flashes on the front cover and on the side of my paper copy. I can only confirm that the story itself is just as attention-grabbing as the title, it won’t let you get on with your life!

Quincy, Lisa and Samantha… three girls with one thing in common: they all belong to a very select group of survivors when everybody else was killed. They are the ‘Final Girls’. Quincy is the survivor of the Pine Cottage killing and is trying to make a living with a baking blog. She’s thrown back into the spotlight when Lisa is found dead. Isn’t it ironic really to survive a massacre only to kill yourself afterwards? Where did that survival instinct go?

Things start to get really weird when Samantha – after years of hiding – turns up on Quincy’s doorstep, claiming she wants to make sure she’s ok and isn’t thinking about killing herself too. Since Quincy is feeling guilty in some way for not having been able to stop Lisa, she welcomes her in her home and before you know it Samantha settles right in.

Before I knew it a string of questions started to form, it was like a stampede inside my brain and I felt compelled to read ‘just one more chapter’ only to have lost hours when I finally looked up again. The storyline had me in its grip, the writing was brilliant, there was plenty of suspicion to go round in this novel with one of my favorite tropes: two seemingly unreliable characters.

The further into the story the more suspicious I got and the more I wondered what was happening under my own nose. Is Sam to be trusted? Why is she really there? She clearly has a manipulative streak as she goads Sam to show her darker side. So is Sam a bad girl? Or is it Quincy, does she have something to hide? She doesn’t remember anything about what happened 10 years ago, or so she’s telling. After a while I even started to wonder if it could be that she stabbed her friends. And why was Sam pushing Quincy to remember at all? Many many questions that make this a very intruiging plot to follow. At some point I really didn’t know who to suspect more! They both seemed to hold a lot of promise :-).

The story is gradually revealed through snippets of that fatal weekend in the past at Pine Cottage until it finally comes together into a heart-stopping finale, and believe me, I’m not exaggerating at all. This book already reads like a full-on movie scene and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on the big screen in the (hopefully near) future! I’m rounding my rating up to 5* on Amazon and Goodreads, so get in on this novel, you won’t regret!

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.