The Only Survivors by Megan Miranda on April 11, 2023
Genres: Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense, Fiction / Women
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
Seven hours in the past. Seven days in the present. Seven survivors remaining. Who would you save?
A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine—a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night.
To keep one another safe.
To hold one another accountable.
Or both.
This was a creepy mystery/thriller that gave me an uneasy feeling. This is a slow burn with a few twists I didn’t see coming.
This one starts out a bit confusing, but hang with it because it’s meant to be ominous and foreboding in feeling. My initial thought is who are all these people and why do I care? But then we get to meet each character and find out a little back story on each one.
It alternates in revealing bits of the past to the current time frame. An accident from a decade prior left 9 survivors. They all made a pact to meet up each year at The Shallows, a beach house owned by one of the survivors, to be together the week the accident took place. They agreed to never talk about the accident again with anyone. But this year, there are only 7 of them. One died from a suicide and the other an overdose.
They all come to The Shallows, or The Ghost House, as the locals refer to it each year to feel safe and to make sure no one has said anything about the accident. Cassidy, Josh, Brody, Hollis, Amaya, Oliver, Grace are the last ones standing! But can they remain safe? Somebody is watching the Shallows and playing mind games with them. They each suspect it is one of the group.
Cassidy finds a cellphone at the beach on one of the first days she is there. She discovers it is the same phone that has sent her messages about one of the survivor’s obituary. Who is trying to lure her to The Shallows and why? She found that Ian, the owner of the phone, also sent her an email days before his death. Who can she trust now?
This was so creepy and had me turning pages to find out what was going on. The ending is not what I expected. I thought Megan Miranda wrote a smart thriller about how trust among secret keepers can be tough! This would make a great movie. I swear I could almost hear the creepy music as I was reading this one.