Failed journalist Leah Stevens leaves Boston and moves to rural Pennsylvania with a friend, Emmy Grey, but when Emmy disappears, leaving behind no clues or trail, Leah is forced to revisit her past to restore her credibility and uncover the truth about Emmy.

The story is told in Leah’s voice. Leah questions many things she hears people say and things they do which kept the story interesting. It was all a bit complicated and a bit far-fetched but it was entertaining. ( )

Suspense

The Perfect Stranger A Novel by Megan Miranda and published by Simon & Schuster is a great read. Thank you to Netgalley the publisher and author for my advanced copy for an honest review. I am one of those people who needs to read things in order so I did read All the Missing Girls and loved it. I feel that the plot was very well developed and the reverse chronological order was genius. So if you haven’t read that do start there. I am very glad I did, even though books can be read as standalones I am so glad I read them together.
Failed Journalist Leah Steven's life has hit rock bottom when she runs into her old friend Emmy Grey in a bar in Boston. Emmy has just broken up with her boyfriend and because both women want to get away from Boston suggests that she and Leah move to rural Pennsylvania and start their lives anew. All is going well until a woman who bears a uncanny resemblance to Leah is assaulted and left for dead and Emmy disappears days later, this should have you hooked if I stop right here but this is just the beginning. The Journalist in Leah is determined to find Emmy, but the more time that Leah spends time looking the messier things get. Leah gets help from Kyle Donovan a detective from the area that helps. I feel that the intrigue of potential love for this story makes it so much better.
This roller coaster ride is read in the prospect of Leah, the character is so well developed and complex that it makes the story so much better. The more time that passes the more Leah starts to second guess her thoughts and memories. every time you as the reader get the feeling that the idea of Emmy is constructed. Is all this real? All and all a perfectly strange read.

Probably more like a very jaded 3.5 star.

I think had I read this right after something like Romanceathon I would have loved it. However a pretty good mystery after a few really great thrillers wasn’t to its benefit.

However, I loved the characters and the plot. I would recommend it and I will continue reading her writing. ( )

The more I think about this book, the more annoyed I get about all the loose ends and unlikely connections. And there's no way to discuss it without major spoilers, so if you're at all interested in reading it (not a choice I would recommend), don't reveal the long hidden section that follows.

The basis of the story is that a young woman's temporary roommate has disappeared under suspicious circumstances and may be in peril. But when the narrator, Leah Stevens, reports her missing, police begin to suspect that Leah is making the whole thing up and is in fact responsible for a serious crime.

Okay, here’s the setup, chronologically. Emmy (not her real name but that’s how she’s known through most of the book), as a teen, is involved in an arson-murder with her friend (cousin? – it’s never clearly set out) Bethany Jarvitz. Bethany takes the fall and goes to prison, and she’s royally pissed, even though she never rats Emmy out. (Why?) She just sends letters to random addresses where she thinks Emmy might be, saying things like “you’re just as guilty as I am but I’m in jail and when I get out I’m going to get you.” (Note – outgoing correspondence from prison inmates – with the exception of communication with their attorneys – is monitored. Doubtful that threatening mail would be permitted to go out.)

Meanwhile, Leah graduates college with a shiny journalism degree and moves to Boston, counting on an internship job, which falls through and now she doesn’t have enough money to rent an apartment. She moves in temporarily with a college chum, Paige, and Paige’s boyfriend Aaron. After a relatively short time, Aaron slips a strong sedative into her drink one night and proceeds to try to drown her in the bathtub, while Paige is out. And Leah doesn’t tell Paige??? She just bails out of the apartment and goes to the local university, hoping to score a roommate situation in cheap student dig. As she’s looking at the offerings, Emmy approaches her and says she has a short-term rental to share, but only for four months, as she is scheduled to leave at the end of that time to go to Africa with the Peace Corps.

Turns out Emmy has recognized a striking physical similarity between Leah and Bethany (remember Bethany?) and – years before Bethany is due to be released, figures she can steal Leah’s identity for Bethany to use when the time comes. To this end, she lifts Leah’s wallet one night when they are out drinking and lets Leah assume some stranger in the bar has taken it.

End of four months, Leah has a job and gets her own apartment and Emmy takes off for Africa. (Lie. We don’t know where she went or what she was doing, but it was not Peace Corps.)

Eight years go by. Leah is a hotshot newspaper reporter covering a cluster of coed suicides at the university. One of them appears to be a pill overdose / bathtub drowning. Leah finds out the drug is the same one Aaron used on her, AND that he is one of the coed’s professors. She files a story and uses an “anonymous source” to say the coed got the pills from “one of her professors” and she knows this to be true “because he gave some to me”. The “anonymous source” is Leah herself, but she can’t (won’t?) insert herself into the story, and when her boss begins leaning on her to verify the potentially libelous statement, she digs in her heels, quoting confidentiality, when really she’s unwilling to out herself as the recipient of Aaron’s earlier attentions.

Aaron, overcome with guilt when the story breaks, hangs himself, and his widow Paige threatens a huge lawsuit, so the paper insists that Leah quit and leave town in the hopes that this will all die down.

Now -- Is the author saying Aaron was involved in all the “suicides” or just the drowning one? And why would he do even that one? Sex doesn’t seem to be a motive – he just liked to drug & drown people?
Why was it important (as we later learn) that Paige was actually at home when Aaron died and subsequently made up a story about coming home to find him hanging from the stairway banister? Is the author suggesting that the wife killed him and made it look like a suicide? If so, why? (Other than the fact that he seemed to be a rotten guy.) And if she did, why threaten a lawsuit that would have brought a much closer examination of his death?

Anyway, here’s Leah, homeless and jobless again, when she runs into Emmy in a Boston bar! Quelle coincidence! And Emmy just happens to have rented a little lakeside cabin in western Pennsylvania, in a town where they are searching for high school teachers, and wouldn’t that be a great job for Leah? Who of course goes along with it.

How Emmy knew that Leah would be in need of shelter at that particular moment, we’re never told. But everything is tickety-boo until a young woman is discovered at the lakeshore with her head caved in. Her name? Bethany Jarvitz – yes, the very same Bethany, who, it turns out, has been bashed in the head by her very good friend, Emmy!

We never know why Emmy killed Bethany, after moving heaven and earth to help Bethany establish a new identity (by stealing Leah’s) after Bethany got out of jail. But Emmy figures this is as good a time as any to vanish.

All poor old dumb Leah knows is that her roommate has disappeared, and there must have been foul play because she found a distinctive necklace that Emmy always wore wedged between the floorboards of the porch, with a broken chain. (Don’t get hopeful that this will ever be explained, because it isn’t.)

And when Leah calls the cops to report Emmy missing, they learn that “Emmy Grey” doesn’t exist. No birth certificate, no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no record of any such person in the Peace Corps. The vague night-clerk job at a local motel can’t be verified with any of the businesses, and no one recalls ever having seen her. For some reason, this makes the cops believe Leah is the person who whacked Bethany, so now she not only has to prove Emmy was real, but that she's innocent of any wrongdoing.

Eventually, the narrator figures it all out, being a hotshot investigative journalist, but there are so many loose ends and illogical actions floating around in this stew that it’s pretty well indigestible. Megan Miranda is not an author I will be following in the future. ( )