Final Girls

Final Girls is a thriller by the American writer Todd Ritter, writing under the name Riley Sager, published in 2017. It takes the horror-film convention of the single survivor and gives it to three women whose real massacres the press has linked together.

Quincy Carpenter was a college student on holiday with friends when the trip ended in a massacre that left her the only one alive. A police officer named Franklin Cooper found her, an escaped patient from a mental hospital was blamed for the killings, and the newspapers compared her to two other survivors, Lisa Milner and Samantha Boyd. The three women have nothing in common except the fact of having survived, and the comparison has followed Quincy ever since.

Ten years later Quincy is barely holding herself together. She trusts almost nobody except Cooper and her boyfriend Jeff, and she cannot remember anything about the night it happened. When she learns that Lisa has killed herself, and Sam turns up at her home to push her into remembering Pinewood Cottage, the arrangement she has built her life on begins to break apart.