From the bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, a new novel about a search & rescue expert, a kidnapped woman, and the lost girls who haunt them both.

There is a girl in a basement.
The door has stopped opening.
The light is gone.

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?

Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

This is one of those thrillers that almost worked for me, right up until it didn’t. And unfortunately, the reason it didn’t comes down to a trope I have very little patience for at this point.

I read a lot of thrillers. Probably too many. And when you’ve spent enough time in the genre, certain shortcuts start to feel less like clever twists and more like lazy conveniences. This book leans hard on one of my least favorite of all time: the “we were practically identical” reveal. I know people can resemble one another. That’s not the issue. It’s how frequently this device shows up in thrillers as a narrative escape hatch. You’d think the world was populated entirely by copy-paste clones of everyone the way this trope gets used.

Once that element appeared here, my hackles went up immediately. It put me on the defensive and made me suspicious of everything that followed. And unfortunately, my instincts were mostly right.

Up until about three-quarters of the way through, I was genuinely engaged. The setup is strong, and the alternating perspectives work well. The tension surrounding missing girls, buried secrets, and generational rot in a powerful family kept me turning pages. There’s a solid atmosphere of unease, especially in the sections involving the girl trapped in the basement. Those chapters are claustrophobic and unsettling in a way that initially felt very effective.

Audrey, the search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her missing best friend Janie, is a compelling lead. Her fixation feels real and it was understandable. Her guilt makes sense. And the idea of a local legend about a forest witch who saves girls from bad men adds an interesting layer of folklore and dread. I liked how the book initially positioned that legend as both comfort and warning. This author used something similar in “hat Lies in the Woods” and it worked well there, too. I think my biggest problem this time around is it was a little underutilized.

My biggest problem with this book was the reveal. I could not buy into it, again, because it’s an overused trop that I feel has been done so much that it needs to be retired. When it hit, , the book lost much of its tension for me because the answers became increasingly predictable. That’s the frustrating part. The bones of a better thriller are here. The pacing is solid. The writing itself is perfectly competent. And the early tension works. But relying on tired plot devices undercuts all of that. When twists feel convenient instead of inevitable, the emotional payoff disappears. In the end, this book didn’t surprise me, and unfortunately when the reveal hit, I quickly went from really liking the book to feeling it was just okay.

I will say that the audiobook narration helped keep me engaged longer than I might have been otherwise. Ina Barrón and Karissa Vacker do an excellent job with the material. Their performances add nuance and urgency, especially in the darker sections. Listening alongside reading definitely elevated the experience and smoothed over some of the bumps.

If you’re newer to thrillers, or if overdone tropes and plot points don’t bother you, this might be for you. It’s readable, tense in places, and competently executed. For seasoned thriller readers, though, it may feel overly familiar and a bit too reliant on tricks that have been done better elsewhere.

This one almost had me. Almost.