Thrillers & Suspense
![Megan Miranda - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B005NE2K7E.jpg)
The Only Survivors: A Novel
From the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls and "master of suspense, Megan Miranda" (Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl), a thrilling mystery about a group of former classmates who reunite to mark the tenth anniversary of a tragic accident-only to have one of the survivors disappear, casting fear and suspicion on the original tragedy.
Seven hours in the past. Seven days in the present. Seven survivors remaining. Who would you save?
A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine-a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night.
To keep one another safe.
To hold one another accountable.
Or both.
Their annual meeting place, a house on the Outer Banks, has long been a refuge. But by the tenth anniversary, Cassidy Bent has worked to distance herself from the tragedy, and from the other survivors. She's changed her mobile number. She's blocked the others' email addresses. This year, she is determined to finally break ties once and for all. But on the day of the reunion, she receives a text with an obituary attached: another survivor is gone. Now they are seven-and Cassidy finds herself hurling back toward the group, wild with grief-and suspicion.
Almost immediately, something feels off this year. Cassidy is the first to notice when Amaya, annual organizer, slips away, overwhelmed. This wouldn't raise alarm except for the impending storm. Suddenly, they're facing the threat of closed roads and surging waters…again. Then Amaya stops responding to her phone. After all they've been through, she wouldn't willfully make them worry. Would she?
And-as they promised long ago-each survivor will do whatever he or she can do to save one another. Won't they?
A propulsive and chilling locked-box mystery filled with the dazzling hairpin twists that are the author's signature, The Only Survivors is New York Times-bestselling author Megan Miranda's best novel yet.
Seven hours in the past. Seven days in the present. Seven survivors remaining. Who would you save?
A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine-a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night.
To keep one another safe.
To hold one another accountable.
Or both.
Their annual meeting place, a house on the Outer Banks, has long been a refuge. But by the tenth anniversary, Cassidy Bent has worked to distance herself from the tragedy, and from the other survivors. She's changed her mobile number. She's blocked the others' email addresses. This year, she is determined to finally break ties once and for all. But on the day of the reunion, she receives a text with an obituary attached: another survivor is gone. Now they are seven-and Cassidy finds herself hurling back toward the group, wild with grief-and suspicion.
Almost immediately, something feels off this year. Cassidy is the first to notice when Amaya, annual organizer, slips away, overwhelmed. This wouldn't raise alarm except for the impending storm. Suddenly, they're facing the threat of closed roads and surging waters…again. Then Amaya stops responding to her phone. After all they've been through, she wouldn't willfully make them worry. Would she?
And-as they promised long ago-each survivor will do whatever he or she can do to save one another. Won't they?
A propulsive and chilling locked-box mystery filled with the dazzling hairpin twists that are the author's signature, The Only Survivors is New York Times-bestselling author Megan Miranda's best novel yet.
Editorial Reviews
"Author of heartstopping titles like Such a Quiet Place and The Last to Vanish, Megan Miranda continues to shock readers with her latest lock-box mystery, The Only Survivors."
-PopSugar
"A heart-pumping thriller... Set in the Outer Banks and full of Miranda's signature ‘it could happen to you so easily' tone, this one promises to have you sleeping with the lights on."
-ScaryMommy
"It would be hard to concoct a more promisingly sinister setting [that] affords plenty of hiding places for predators and plenty of opportunities for the weather itself to turn villainous. Miranda uses this setting to maximum effect, both as a plot device and as a way to inject steady droplets of terror into the narrative. Masterfully suspenseful."
-Booklist (Starred Review)
"In Miranda's newest, old classmates get together ten years after a tragedy, but when one of them disappears, it calls into question everything the group thought it had already reckoned with. Miranda always delivers a gripping thriller."
-CrimeReads
PRAISE FOR THE LAST TO VANISH
"This eerie thriller, in which the setting itself may be actively malevolent, can stand next to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King's The Shining ... Expect shivers and lots of them."
-Booklist (starred)
PRAISE FOR SUCH A QUIET PLACE
"Miranda, who makes the setting, where everyone knows one another and ends up fearing one another, all the more chilling for its seeming normality, is a master of misdirection and sudden plot twists, leading up to a wallop of an ending. A powerful, paranoid thriller." – Booklist (Starred Review)
"A claustrophobic and suspenseful whodunit…that ponders the eternal question of how well we really know those closest to us." – BookPage (Starred Review)
-PopSugar
"A heart-pumping thriller... Set in the Outer Banks and full of Miranda's signature ‘it could happen to you so easily' tone, this one promises to have you sleeping with the lights on."
-ScaryMommy
"It would be hard to concoct a more promisingly sinister setting [that] affords plenty of hiding places for predators and plenty of opportunities for the weather itself to turn villainous. Miranda uses this setting to maximum effect, both as a plot device and as a way to inject steady droplets of terror into the narrative. Masterfully suspenseful."
-Booklist (Starred Review)
"In Miranda's newest, old classmates get together ten years after a tragedy, but when one of them disappears, it calls into question everything the group thought it had already reckoned with. Miranda always delivers a gripping thriller."
-CrimeReads
PRAISE FOR THE LAST TO VANISH
"This eerie thriller, in which the setting itself may be actively malevolent, can stand next to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King's The Shining ... Expect shivers and lots of them."
-Booklist (starred)
PRAISE FOR SUCH A QUIET PLACE
"Miranda, who makes the setting, where everyone knows one another and ends up fearing one another, all the more chilling for its seeming normality, is a master of misdirection and sudden plot twists, leading up to a wallop of an ending. A powerful, paranoid thriller." – Booklist (Starred Review)
"A claustrophobic and suspenseful whodunit…that ponders the eternal question of how well we really know those closest to us." – BookPage (Starred Review)
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
Our house, like most things, came down to luck.
Luck that the property had managed to withstand two hurricanes in the last decade, perched on a set of pilings at the edge of the dunes, protected only by aluminum storm shutters and cedar shake siding that had faded over the years to a weatherworn gray.
Luck that there was space for all of us within its five bedrooms, with balconies that connected via wraparound porches and precarious wooden steps over three stories.
Luck that the beachfront rental belonged to Oliver's family, and, that first year, after Clara's funeral, when we were panicked and desperate and made that pact, Oliver had said: I know a place.
The house was tucked away from the activity of town, at the far edge of a dead-end road. It was close enough to see the neighbors down the stretch of sand-especially in the dark, with the windows lit up, beacons in the night-but still private enough to feel removed. A peace of mind in both regards.
It was the perfect haven for us, the lucky ones: survivors of the crash, and then of the raging river, the unrelenting storm.
Oliver called it The Shallows, a name that felt like a promise. A place of safety, and retreat, isolated from the rest of the world, and surrounded on all sides by the endless deep. We came here the first time out of convenience, but we kept coming back because returning here year after year removed the necessity of decisions, the burden of plans. And because it was hundreds of miles from the site of the accident, protected from the undertow of the past.
I drove five hours to the coast, and then over a series of bridges to the southern barrier islands, passing the time in a state of steady dread, trying to distract myself with a variety of podcasts I couldn't focus on, before finally giving over to the silence.
The turnoff appeared before I was ready for it, a cluster of uncoordinated mailboxes before a faded street sign, bent from the wind and sun-scorched white at the center.
The house was at the end of the unpaved road, the parking area out front a semicircle of rocks and weeds, with a fine coating of sand that I'd felt under the wheels for the last ten miles. On the drive in, the land progressively narrowed between the ocean and the sound, and the dunes crept closer to the road, sand swirling across the pavement in gusty spirals. From a distance, the sand formed a sort of haze, suspended like fog in the atmosphere, encroaching from the sea. Without regular maintenance, I imagined, all of this would be swept away; every sign of humanity wiped clean, in a steady assault of nature.
The geography was constantly shifting out here. In the marshlands, water seeped onto the grassy edges of the road. After a storm, islands could have become peninsulas, or vice versa. And the dunes were always moving, growing-like everything in sight was waiting to be consumed.
But somehow this house remained.
There were four cars in a row out front, the last being Amaya's rust-colored sedan, with a collection of decals lining the rear windshield. It was already late afternoon-I assumed I was the last to arrive. Not everyone lived within driving distance anymore.
I pulled into the spot beside a familiar dark Honda, jarred by the car seat visible in the back, by how much could change in a year.
When I stepped outside, the air tasted like salt, like something from my nightmares. Sometimes, alone, in the dark of night, I'd wake from a dream still tasting the river, storm water, a gritty soil in the back of my throat. But other times I'd wake to the scent of saltwater air instead, like I wasn't sure which was the nightmare-then or now.
I breathed slowly, staring up at the house. The raised porch, multiple gables, windows reflecting the sun and sky. The structure was dated but objectively beautiful, I knew, in the way it rose unobtrusively from the landscape, like driftwood from the beach, positioned with care to welcome the forces of nature, instead of fighting against them.
A set of wide wooden steps led up to the front door, where we'd taken that single photo our first year-the eight of us crammed together, sitting shoulder to shoulder, knees pressing into the body in front of us, like proof: We're still here.
I straightened my spine, steeling myself. On a list of things that could set my nerves on edge, this would be near the top. Not quite as high as driving on curving dark roads, or being lost. But arriving late to this house, with this group: high.
They weren't bad people. They were just bad people for me.
A shadow ...
Our house, like most things, came down to luck.
Luck that the property had managed to withstand two hurricanes in the last decade, perched on a set of pilings at the edge of the dunes, protected only by aluminum storm shutters and cedar shake siding that had faded over the years to a weatherworn gray.
Luck that there was space for all of us within its five bedrooms, with balconies that connected via wraparound porches and precarious wooden steps over three stories.
Luck that the beachfront rental belonged to Oliver's family, and, that first year, after Clara's funeral, when we were panicked and desperate and made that pact, Oliver had said: I know a place.
The house was tucked away from the activity of town, at the far edge of a dead-end road. It was close enough to see the neighbors down the stretch of sand-especially in the dark, with the windows lit up, beacons in the night-but still private enough to feel removed. A peace of mind in both regards.
It was the perfect haven for us, the lucky ones: survivors of the crash, and then of the raging river, the unrelenting storm.
Oliver called it The Shallows, a name that felt like a promise. A place of safety, and retreat, isolated from the rest of the world, and surrounded on all sides by the endless deep. We came here the first time out of convenience, but we kept coming back because returning here year after year removed the necessity of decisions, the burden of plans. And because it was hundreds of miles from the site of the accident, protected from the undertow of the past.
I drove five hours to the coast, and then over a series of bridges to the southern barrier islands, passing the time in a state of steady dread, trying to distract myself with a variety of podcasts I couldn't focus on, before finally giving over to the silence.
The turnoff appeared before I was ready for it, a cluster of uncoordinated mailboxes before a faded street sign, bent from the wind and sun-scorched white at the center.
The house was at the end of the unpaved road, the parking area out front a semicircle of rocks and weeds, with a fine coating of sand that I'd felt under the wheels for the last ten miles. On the drive in, the land progressively narrowed between the ocean and the sound, and the dunes crept closer to the road, sand swirling across the pavement in gusty spirals. From a distance, the sand formed a sort of haze, suspended like fog in the atmosphere, encroaching from the sea. Without regular maintenance, I imagined, all of this would be swept away; every sign of humanity wiped clean, in a steady assault of nature.
The geography was constantly shifting out here. In the marshlands, water seeped onto the grassy edges of the road. After a storm, islands could have become peninsulas, or vice versa. And the dunes were always moving, growing-like everything in sight was waiting to be consumed.
But somehow this house remained.
There were four cars in a row out front, the last being Amaya's rust-colored sedan, with a collection of decals lining the rear windshield. It was already late afternoon-I assumed I was the last to arrive. Not everyone lived within driving distance anymore.
I pulled into the spot beside a familiar dark Honda, jarred by the car seat visible in the back, by how much could change in a year.
When I stepped outside, the air tasted like salt, like something from my nightmares. Sometimes, alone, in the dark of night, I'd wake from a dream still tasting the river, storm water, a gritty soil in the back of my throat. But other times I'd wake to the scent of saltwater air instead, like I wasn't sure which was the nightmare-then or now.
I breathed slowly, staring up at the house. The raised porch, multiple gables, windows reflecting the sun and sky. The structure was dated but objectively beautiful, I knew, in the way it rose unobtrusively from the landscape, like driftwood from the beach, positioned with care to welcome the forces of nature, instead of fighting against them.
A set of wide wooden steps led up to the front door, where we'd taken that single photo our first year-the eight of us crammed together, sitting shoulder to shoulder, knees pressing into the body in front of us, like proof: We're still here.
I straightened my spine, steeling myself. On a list of things that could set my nerves on edge, this would be near the top. Not quite as high as driving on curving dark roads, or being lost. But arriving late to this house, with this group: high.
They weren't bad people. They were just bad people for me.
A shadow ...
