The Perfect Stranger

Leah Stevens has a thriving career as a journalist in Boston until she unexpectedly reconnects with an old roommate and uproots her life to become a teacher in Pennsylvania. Leah wants to make a difference, she wants to start over and blend in the background, but really she is trying to outrun her complicated past. When she runs into her eccentric roommate, Emmy, that she hasn’t seen in eight years, it feels like fate. 

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Everything seems to be going according to plan, that is until a local woman, who happens to look just like Leah, is attacked and left in a coma. The prime suspect is a co-worker that Leah has a history with. Suddenly, the police are asking questions and detectives are looking too closely at Leah and her mysterious roommate. 

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The mystery deepens when Emmy doesn’t return home and soon enough Leah realizes she maybe doesn’t know her roommate as well as she thought. The past can’t stay hidden forever.

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This book gave me a bit of whiplash. I actually almost put this one down, but I was committed to trying the first 100 pages. Right around that point, the tension picked up and I couldn’t put it down.

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I had a hard time getting into the rhythm of the writing at first. The book is first-person perspective but the main character compartmentalizes so well that I had a hard time connecting to her and her situation early on. That being said, once I got into the story and the other characters, I found the writing to be dark and beautifully descriptive. The main character shifts into focus about 100 pages in and I was rooting for her every step of the way after that. 

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There are several mysteries unfolding at the same time and by the end, I was flying through the pages to figure out what happened, who was the villain, and what happened in Boston. There are layers and layers to this story and I loved it. Leah plays the investigative journalist role perfectly and pulls the reader right along with her.