Book Review – Five Total Strangers by Natalie D Richards
A hitched ride home in a snow storm turns sinister when one of the passengers is plotting for the ride to end in disaster.
When Mira flies home to spend Christmas with her mother in Pittsburgh, a record-breaking blizzard results in a cancelled layover. Desperate to get to her grief-ridden mother in the wake of a family death, Mira hitches a ride with a group of friendly college kids who were on her initial flight.
As the drive progresses and weather conditions become more treacherous, Mira realizes that the four other passengers she’s stuck in the car with don’t actually know one another.
Soon, they’re not just dealing with heavy snowfall and ice-slick roads, but the fact that somebody will stop at nothing to ensure their trip ends in a deadly disaster.
My rating:
I received this book from the publisher via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
This book is the perfect twisty creepy stalker thriller for an autumn or winter night. I ended up marathoning it when I couldn’t sleep (probably not my best plan, given how caught up in the story I became!) and really enjoyed it.
We follow Mira, desperate to get home to be with her mum in their first Christmas since her aunt died. She hitches a ride with people she meets at the airport, and they all become more suspicious and over-exaggerated by the second. It becomes clear pretty early on that Mira has a stalker and they are with her, in some form, on this journey.
The whole story hinges on the fact that some weird stuff happens, the weather is massively against them, and we know the stalker is trying to engineer things so Mira feels she is stuck.
I did find the characters a little three dimensional, and we never really get enough background on anyone to really get to know them. However, that doesn’t really take away from the thriller element, especially if you read through in one go, it just means it probably wouldn’t hold up well to a re-read. We also end with a lot of unknowns, both about the other passengers but also about other people they meet on the way.
But honestly, at the time of reading, this didn’t affect my enjoyment at all – the pace and tension was easily enough to keep me reading along. 3 stars.
Buy Five Total Strangers from Waterstones.
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