The common theme is that the people around Leah aren’t trustworthy, and that she’s naturally a very suspicious person. I wish I could go into more detail about how the three storylines work together, but it’s really important that details are revealed in a specific order in the book. It’s a lot of plot to manage, but Miranda does it well.
(I bet Sarah just read this part in the editing process and messaged me, “Okay, what happened?”) There’s really three intertwining stories happening in this book: there’s the story that got Leah fired about student suicides, there’s Emmy’s disappearance, and there’s an attack on a local woman who looks suspiciously like Leah that results in a fellow teacher being arrested. The police seem to think Leah may have made Emmy up. There is no paper trail to follow Emmy paid cash for everything. No one of a similar description worked at the hotel and no one can locate Emmy’s supposed boyfriend. She’s shocked to find out there’s no record of anyone named Emmy Grey ever existing. Leah gives her a few days, wondering if she’s with her boyfriend, but when the rent comes due (something Emmy wouldn’t miss), Leah contacts the police.
Emmy works the night-shift at a hotel, the opposite schedule as Leah, so they often only see each other only in passing. Her roommate, Emmy Grey, is a free-spirit, the type of person who throws a dart at a map to figure where she’s going next. She’s fled to a small town where she’s teaching English and rents a house with a woman she briefly lived with in college. She printed an insinuation that a college professor might have had something to do with a rash of student suicides without the proof to back it up–an insinuation that could get her sued for libel.
She was a journalist in Boston, but one story derailed her career. I always felt just off-balance while reading, never quite able to trust my footing. If you like books that screw with your mind and cause you to question everything, then this is the book for you. One of my favorite books from last year was Megan Miranda’s psychological thriller All the Missing Girls, so I went into her follow-up book The Perfect Stranger with high expectations.