The Perfect Stranger, by Megan Miranda

FIVE stars of Five

Five stars all around.
This book had me completely on edge the entire ride.

The narrator is borderline unreliable; you are never quite sure if she’s telling us the truth, lying to herself, or outright crazy. She does have some boundary issues, some of which I related to, but the reader can’t be sure if they cross a line or exactly which line they cross. Megan Miranda does an excellent job of throwing in clues here and there to keep us off kilter.

But reliable or not (I’m not spoiling the answer!), the narrator is a very intelligent woman. I loved her. To the outside world she may have had some issues, and she’s disappointed herself, but that does nothing to take away the very quick way her mind works.

I’ve seen some reviews state that the narrative isn’t perfect, and while that may technically be true, Miranda accomplishes so much more than your average author does in a mystery book like this. This story is intricate, in the very best way, and I felt Miranda did a genius job putting it all together, just as she did in her previous book All the Missing Girls.

I don’t believe it’s a spoiler to state that nothing much is what it seems here, and that Miranda really shows how any narrator can be unreliable because you are seeing the story solely through their interpretation of events. But what if a reliable narrator tells you a story based on misinterpreted events?

All the Missing Girls was incredible and made me a huge fan of Megan Miranda, now The Perfect Stranger has sealed that deal. I cannot wait for her next book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for allowing me an advance copy for review.

All the Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda

FIVE of FIVE stars

Holy f-ing crap this book is fantastic.
I don’t know how this book went from a fairly emotionless beginning to full speed excitement from which you can’t tear yourself apart… but Megan Miranda has done the job. And she has done the job WELL. I just this minute finished the book so I’m still digesting everything I just read, but I don’t want to lose this feeling before I start writing, so here I go.

The story starts with Nic Farrell receiving a call from her brother calling her back home to North Carolina for an emergency with their father. She arrives in the small little town she grew up in, we meet a few characters, and then we’re taken ahead two weeks. At this two week mark, everything still seems pretty dull in town, and I was trying to deal with the absolute lack of any joy in Nic’s character. It never occurred to me that we’d missed anything that happened in the previous two weeks.

And then it started going backward.

Day by day, like the film Memento, we are brought back (tick-tock, Nic) through the previous two weeks, and we peel back the layers of all the characters – and I mean ALL the layers. These characters who had at first appeared to be so tight-lipped and uncommunicative suddenly reveal a whole mess of trouble that happened during just those two weeks. At the same time, we learn bit by bit what happened ten years ago when young Corrinne Prescott disappeared.

What happened to her? Who was responsible? There doesn’t seem any way any of these characters were responsible, and yet they seem to be the only characters who could be responsible. I went over each suspect multiple times trying to figure out how any of them could be the culprit, and this requires not only paying attention to every single word and pronoun and tense, but also keeping track of everything that happened in the future so you can understand the past.

Sounds confusing? It is not. I wouldn’t recommend reading this over several days, but that won’t be a problem because you won’t be able to put the book down until it’s over. Once the book grabs you, it won’t let you go until the final page.

I am getting old, and I’ve come to the realization that there is no way I’ll ever read All The Books. So reading a book twice is now a waste for me when I could read a brand new one. This book changes that. I could read this book over right now, and then mark all the chapters so I could read it all over again backwards (I don’t recommend you do this the first time). I would make an exception to my rule, that is how much I loved this book. Miranda has pulled off an incredibly complicated story with very real characters. Characters you don’t begin to really know until the very end.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, female writers are KILLING IT in 2016. Put this book on your Must Read list now!

So many thousands of thank yous to NetGalley for the chance to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review, and thank you to Nicole at Simon & Schuster for urging me to move it to the top of my list. WAY more than five stars for this book.