Skip to main content

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda

The Perfect Stranger is Megan Miranda's follow up to All the Missing Girls.  I read and reviewed All the Missing Girls back in January.  The Perfect Stranger differs in structure to All the Missing Girls which largely unspooled its story backwards.  While The Perfect Stranger follows a more traditional story structure, it is no less gripping.

After Leah Stevens torches her career in Boston in pursuit of the truth, a seemingly chance encounter with her former, post-college roommate, Emmy Grey, spurs the two women to move to western Pennsylvania.  Both women are in search of a fresh start and while Leah finds hers as a high school English teacher, Emmy flounders in nameless, nondescript, dead end jobs.  When a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Leah is found left for dead on the shores of the nearby lake, Leah soon realizes that her roommate has been missing for an undetermined length of time.  And Leah realizes that it is the beginning of the end of her fresh start because both the woman's brutal beating and her roommate's disappearance will draw Leah into both investigations and compel the police to dig into her background.

There are several threads of mysteries in this book.  There's the mystery of what happened in Boston and why, and these answers are twisted, disturbing, and terrifying.  There's the mystery of the identity of the perpetrator who brutally beat Leah's doppelganger and left her for dead.  Was this woman the intended target?  Or was she mistaken for Leah who may have been the true intended target?  How does this woman connect to Emmy Grey?  And finally as the police search for Emmy, they discover that no such woman with that name exists and since everything from utilities to the lease are in Leah's name, no legal or physical trace of the woman remains.  Who is Emmy?  What or who is she running from and why?

All of these mysteries are bound together by a common theme: women who are victimized by men, and the varying effectiveness of the solutions those women deploy to deal with those situations when they can't or won't go to the police.  This is a theme that runs deep throughout the story.  There's the man who is stalking Leah and whether or not he is connected to the woman left for dead on the shores of the lake.  There's whatever Leah's old college friend's husband did to Leah and has done to other women that drives Leah's attempt to use journalism to expose him.  There's whatever happened to Emmy and her friend that drove them to commit an act for which one of them would do jail time while the other assumes multiple aliases and a life on the run.  It is what draws Emmy to Leah in the first place; it is what both Leah and Emmy have in common.  And it binds them inextricably to each other.  This is a heart pounding, terrifying, disturbing, gripping thriller with more than a few twists that turn the story on its head.  It's a fast read, and it's hard to put down.


--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip.  I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage.  The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it.  It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger.  Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read.  Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one.   Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment.  The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story.  It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve.  Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week.  This  particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst