Riley Sager’s Final Girls follows Quincy Carpenter, a woman infamous for her survival of and inability to remember what the media dubbed “the massacre at Pine Cottage” where five of her friends were murdered by an escaped mental patient. Because she is young, female, and a sole survivor, Quincy is labeled a “Final Girl,” joining the ranks of two other unfortunate women, Lisa and Sam, who survived their own grisly attacks years earlier. Almost a decade later, Quincy’s determination to live a life of normalcy is challenged when Lisa is found dead in her bathtub and Sam shows up on her doorstep to push her out of her comfort zone.

This book is not totally what I expected from the premise and title. I was expecting B-movie slasher vibes, which the flashback scenes do deliver, but those are a small percentage of the story. The present-day story is more psychological mystery; I can’t even qualify it as psychological thriller, because I never felt enough suspense to be worried. It was pretty clear most of Quincy’s choices weren’t good for her, even when she was trying to be “normal” and “move forward,” and wouldn’t end well in the long run, so the majority of the suspense, at least for me, came from waiting to see what the final twist was going to be. What really happened at Pine Cottage? And why did someone kill Lisa now? It’s a solid mystery, though, and kept me curious about where it was going.

It was also an interesting exploration of what true crime might feel like from the inside. Audiences find stories like Quincy’s spine-tingling, and the need to revisit the drama or seek answers seems to force survivors to carry their trauma as part of their identity rather than let it become just one piece of their past. We also get small glimpses of the frustrations Quincy deals with in having her memory loss questioned, her privacy (and safety) encroached on, and the often well-meaning but conflicting encouragements to both “move on” from and “face” her trauma that usually had as much to do with what the person encouraging wanted/needed as what Quincy did.

I will say, one thing that kept taking me out of the story was wondering why there was no mention of Quincy seeing a therapist even semi-regularly. Where was she getting her Xanax prescription if she wasn’t at least going through the motions of checking in with a mental health professional from time to time? Even “normal” people who haven’t been almost murdered benefit from seeing therapists and it would have actually helped her feel more “normal” to have a safe place to vent her feelings about her experience. She definitely could have avoided a few of the plot complications with professional help.

That nit-picky note aside, I give Final Girls a 2.5 out of 5. It’s a mystery that keeps the twists coming, even without the jump-scares.