Survive the Night: A Kayla Hicks Book Review
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.
What is it about?
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.
My review
Charlie has experienced more tragedy in her short life than anyone should have to endure. Yet everyone, including herself, continues to beat her up about her final moments with her best friend Maddy before she was murdered by the campus killer. So the only thing Charlie can think to do is leave college and go home.
But when she meets Josh, another student driving the same way, she desperately agrees to travel with him to escape the torment of her life at college. However, Charlie is unwell. She is constantly thrown between reality and movies that distort reality in her mind.
It isn't long until things begin not adding up in Josh's story during their drive, and now, Charlie worries she may have climbed into a 6-hour drive through woodland and highway with a stranger who could possibly be the campus killer.
This book kept me turning the pages, causing me to question what was real and what wasn't. Just when I thought Charlie was making everything up in her mind, the author would throw a wrench in by putting a chapter in from a different character's point of view, changing what I thought I knew.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a mystery upon a mystery mixed with suspense.
I give this book a five-star review.
Get it here: Survive the Night