The Only Survivors by Megan Miranda was exactly what I was looking for in a thriller. It was unputdownable, filled with the terror of the unknown all throughout and the fear that someone would be the next victim at very turn, as well as the mystery of who was behind the goings on that kept the reader guessing all throughout.
The story told in this book is that of a group of survivors, loosely calling themselves friends, who survived a very traumatic event as teenagers and carry the secrets of that night with them even many years later. Throughout the course of the story the happenings of that night are steadily revealed, all while the characters left alive reunite on the anniversary of said incident, as they do every year. They have to deal with the paranoia they hold for one another that has them trusting no one but themselves over a memory they want to keep buried.
Imagine my surprise and happiness when I discovered a few chapters in that this happened to be a thriller with both present day story going on, as well as past when the incident itself happened. I’ve revealed before that I’m a sucker for this format of book so I was thrilled when I saw the first Then heading. Even better, the chapters that take place in the past follow different characters, giving the reader insight into each of the group of survivors who spend each anniversary of the incident together. I really enjoyed this because the present storyline follows just one person, Cassidy, so it was very interesting to get this small peak into the others minds during the tragedy that happened to them, which played into their present and how each of them interacted with one another and the roads they had each gone done in the years since.
All of this led to a tense conclusion and I honestly spent the whole book not wanting to stop reading whenever I needed to. I particularly liked in the “Then” chapters how it counted backwards in time as far as how events went, from after the accident when the group found help, until the final chapter is the past showed how it actually happened. At first I was thrown off because I expected it to be the other way around, which is typically what I’ve seen in the past, but doing it this way ended up being so much better and tied everything together so much better.
I highly recommend this read for my thriller lovers out there because it was a very enjoyable read!
