THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of New York Times Book Review's "summer reads guaranteed to make your heart thump and your skin crawl"; An Amazon Best of the Month Pick; Named a must-read summer book by The Washington Post, USA Today, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Forbes, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, New York Post, Good Housekeeping, E!, PopSugar, CrimeReads, Thrillist, and BookRiot. It's November 1991. Nirvana's in the tape deck, George H. W. Bush is in the White House, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer. Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it's guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it's to help care for his sick father--or so he says. The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there's something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn't want her to see inside the trunk. As they travel an empty, twisty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly anxious Charlie begins to think she's sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie's jittery mistrust merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination? One thing is certain--Charlie has nowhere to run and no way to call for help. Trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on pitch-black roads and in neon-lit parking lots, Charlie knows the only way to win is to survive the night.
Riley Sager, seudónimo del escritor estadounidense Todd Ritter, es una de las voces más reconocibles del thriller psicológico contemporáneo. Su obra se caracteriza por tramas de alta tensión, giros calculados con bisturí y protagonistas marcados por traumas que nunca se quedan en el pasado. Alcanzó notoriedad internacional con Final Girls, novela con la que obtuvo el ITW Thriller Award, consolidando su lugar dentro del género y marcando el inicio de una producción constante y muy leída.
Entre sus libros más destacados se encuentra La sobreviviente, donde vuelve a explorar la fragilidad de la memoria, la culpa y la violencia latente bajo superficies aparentemente normales. Sus novelas han sido recurrentes en listas de bestsellers y se distinguen por una narrativa ágil, atmósferas claustrofóbicas y un dominio preciso del suspenso, demostrando que el miedo cotidiano puede ser más perturbador que cualquier monstruo.
