When true crime authors and buffs talk about the survivors of a killing spree, they rarely talk about the long aftermath—at least not in the way that Riley Sager does in Final Girls. This thriller is all about the aftermath: the long stays in the hospital, physical and psychological therapy, and fending off the media. This has been Quincey Carpenter’s life for the ten years since her friends were brutally murdered and she ran screaming out of the woods in a bloody dress. She’s holding it together. But just when she thinks she’s found a measure of balance in her life, events conspire to drag her back into the woods.
In her new life, Quincey is an amateur baker with a blog. She lives in an apartment in New York with her boyfriend, a public defender on his way up. Sure, she pops the occasional Xanax to keep her anxiety under control and still meets with the police officer who rescued her after her ordeal. She might have been able to keep going this way if she hadn’t learned that another final girl (a survivor of a set of killings that sounds a lot like what sent Richard Speck to prison for the rest of his life) has died, apparently of suicide. Perhaps she could have weathered that news, but then another final girl shows up on her doorstep asking for help. The news and the visitor throw her so far off her equilibrium that she starts to do and say things that have people seriously worried about her.
There are chapters in which we see what happened to Quincey that night at Pine Cottage, things that she didn’t remember in spite of all the police questioning. While we learn about her past, we follow Quincey while Samantha Boyd, her visitor, pushes her to patrol Central Park, looking for potential rapists and muggers. We also get to see Quincey as she starts to piece together what might have happened to the first final girl, Lisa, as well as the night she became a final girl herself. This book is packed with plot and some wonderful character development, but Sager cranks things up to 11 by deploying a series of twists that made me give up my theories completely and settle in for the show.
Final Girls is a terrific thriller, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. I loved its originality and the way it completely misdirected me so many times. Quincey is the kind of complicated character I relish, with plenty of backstory for me to psychoanalyze. How does a college girl who survived one of the worst things that can ever happen to someone become a baker-blogger? And then how does that baker-blogger end up beating up a homeless man in Central Park? And even after that, how does a vigilante end up facing her terror of her own past? All of those questions are bundled together with amazing plot twists into a thriller that I plan on recommending a lot.