Quincy Carpenter is a Final Girl. She’s the sole survivor of the Pine Cottage Murders, a killing spree that saw her friends all die at the hands of a maniac. It’s been ten years since that fateful night, Quincy is still trying to rebuild her life, she doesn’t remember much, but still remembers ‘Him’. The flash of steel in the moonlight and the cold piercing agony as the knife struck down on her.

The death of another Final Girl, Lisa Milner, brings the only survivor of the massacre at the Nightfall Inn, Samantha Boyd,  out of hiding and straight to Quincys doorstep…but why?

This is an incredibly well written début novel. The pacing is perfect, with its slow introductions and gradual peeling back of layers, only revealing  enough information to pull you into the next chapter, this process continues, picking up pace till the novel reaches a very satisfying conclusion.

The story is full of twists, plenty of red herrings and a lot of baking. (Quincy runs her own baking blog). I thought I had the book worked out twice, and twice Riley Sager laughed at my schoolboy detective work.

Final Girls is a psychological thriller that’s also an homage to those classic slasher movies of the 80s & 90s. What happens to the girl at the end of the movie, with the blanket round her shoulders, covered in blood, sitting in the back of the ambulance?  In Final Girls, Riley Sager has managed to keep an old slasher film fan like me enthralled, and kept me guessing right till the end.This would make for a superb movie, the books slow build , snappy dialogue and excellent set pieces would be perfect for the big screen. I could see it developed into a screenplay that David Fincher would have a blast filming, it really is that good!

Star Rating (out of 5): 4****

Final Girls is released 13th July 2017 by Ebury Press.

Thank you to Ebury Press and Joanna Bennett for sending me an advanced copy of the book.