Review: “Survive the Night” is a fast-paced, twisted thriller | Entertainment

Confused and depressed, Charlie can’t stand staying at Olifant University. Not because her best friend died after being stabbed by a serial killer known as a campus killer. So she dropped out, packed up her luggage, said goodbye to her college boyfriend, and posted a rideshare request on the school bulletin board.

It leads her to Josh, Josh, a slightly older man who says he’s on her way. Charlie isn’t sure if he can trust him, but the need to escape is so strong that he gets into the car on a long drive from New Jersey to Ohio.

For thrillers starting with two strikes, Riley Sager’s “Survive the Night” turned out to be a top-notch reading. strike? First, Sager asks readers to believe that a young woman obsessed with the murder of her roommate gets into a car with a stranger. Second, a young woman stuck in a car with a scary stranger is a worn-out metaphor for a crime novel. I’ve seen this movie before.

That may be the case, as Sager seems to tell us, you have never seen anyone doing it this way.

The author (Riley Sager is the pseudonym of New England writer Todd Ritter) spins his yarn at a desperate pace. The moment Charlie gets into the car, fear comes and the construction of the building never stops. And the twists that readers will rarely see come in so abundantly that they are spinning their heads.

From time to time, neither Charlie nor the reader is convinced how at risk she is, whether Josh (if that is his real name), or perhaps someone else, is a feared person.

What makes the problem worse is that Charlie, whose story is told from that perspective, has a slight grasp of reality.

A movie major, she tends to have hallucinations that suddenly wake up. Hallucinations usually take the form of the noir movie scenes she loves.

To stop them, she was prescribed some medications, but she stopped taking them. As a result, neither she nor the reader can be sure which event in the story is genuine.

The story reached a violent conclusion, or at least seemed so. But on the last four pages, Sager reveals a surprising, but somehow accurate, last surprise.

Bruce Decilva, The Edgar Award winner of the Mystery Writers of America is the author of Mulligan’s criminal novels, including “The Dread Line.”