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readingforsanity · 1 year ago

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The Perfect Stranger | Megan Miranda | Published 2017 | *SPOILERS*

Confronted by a restraining order and the threat of a lawsuit, failed journalist Leah Stevens needs to get out of Boston when she runs into an old friend, Emmy Grey, who has just left a troubled relationship. Emmy proposes they move to rural Pennsylvania, where Leah can get a teaching position and both women can start again. But their new start is threatened when a woman with an eerie resemblance to Leah is assaulted by the lake, and Emmy disappears days later.

Determined to find Emmy, Leah cooperates with Kyle Donovan, a handsome young police officer on the case. As they investigate her friend’s life for clues, Leah begins to wonder: did she ever really know Emmy at all? With no friends, family or a digital footprint, the police begin to suspect that there is no Emmy Grey. Soon Leah’s credibility is at stake, and she is forced to revist her past: the article that ruined her career. To save herself, Leah must uncover the truth about Emmy Grey - and along the way, confront her old demons, find out who she can really trust, and clear her own name.

Everyone in this rural Pennsylvania town has something to hide - including Leah herself. How do you uncover the truth when you are busy hiding your own?

Leah Stevens is a former journalist from Boston. When she is confronted by the threat of a lawsuit and given a restraining order by her former college roommate, she is forced to give up her journalism job. When she reconnects with an old friend, Emmy Grey, who recently returned to the area after doing two years in the Peace Corps, the two of them head off to western Pennsylvania in search of a new life.

Leah is now a schoolteacher. The area was desperate for teachers for their new school as their population continued to rise, and emergency orders were placed for those with no formal training to be able to earn their certification in teaching while actively working as a teacher. She and Emmy have rented a house together near the woods. Their schedules never aligned, Leah working during the day and Emmy working the night shift at a hotel, only coming together in the mornings and in the afternoons before and after Emmy’s shifts.

One morning, Leah is on her way to school when she sees a bunch of first responders and emergency vehicles near the lake about a half mile from her home. Due to her background in journalism, her curiosity is piqued and she gets out of the car, met only with the grisly scene of a young woman having been beaten to near death and left there to die. A coach from the high school, Davis Cobb, has been arrested in relation to the girls’ beating, a witness having placed him there.

Leah is sure that Cobb had done it, as he was basically stalking her as well. Late night phone calls, one appearance to her home after a night drinking and advances that were not reciprocated. The police question her, including Kyle Donovan, a young detective new to the area as well, having requested a transfer to this location after a case he had been working on hadn’t gone well and he had taken it too personally. Leah tells them what she nows, though she never had met the victim before, Bethany Jarvitz, though the resemblance between the two of them was uncanny.

Leah continues on her with her day, her students giving her grief because she is the new meat. At the end of the day, Leah begins to grow concerned for her roommate, who she hasn’t seen for several days. While this isn’t uncommon, Leah is beginning to worry after Bethany’s attack had left her in a coma, unable to give details about what happened to her. When Leah finds Emmy’s necklace, one that she never removed, on the front porch of their home that they also never used, Leah is certain that something has happened to her.

She informs the police of what has happened, though the conversation quickly goes back to Cobb, who the police will be releasing soon as there is no evidence other than a witness statement to hold him. However, Kyle takes the information on Emmy that Leah gives him and promises that he will look into it.

A few days go by with no leads. The Peace Corps has come back and said that there was never any Emmy Grey that was with them in Botswana during the timeframe given, nor anyone matching her description or anything close to her name. The hotel that she worked at had no record of her employment, and the person that was hired to cover for the no call, no show, was actually for a man named Jim, whom Emmy had been seeing. Leah had given that information to the police.

When Emmy’s car is found at the bottom of the lake, and is in the process of being brought back up, Leah is certain that Emmy will be found in the car, deceased. However, it was not Emmy’s body in the front seat of the car, but Jim’s. No trace of Emmy had been found inside the car, or the trunk. Leah identified the vehicle as Emmy’s, and Kyle begins working the case heavily, distancing himself from the relationship that he and Leah had begun during the course of the investigation.

The medical examier stated that Jim’s body had been dead for quite a while, so Leah is back to square one with what is going on. She begins thinking like a journalist, and while grading student papers, finds one student’s entries in their journals to be quite disturbing. Theo Burton, and another student trying to warn her as well. This student is Izzy Marone, Theo’s friend and neighbor.

After her neighbor lets her in, Leah begins searchin Bethany’s apartment for clues. It smells clean, as if Bethany had gone on a cleaning spree prior to her attack. But, Leah finds something else: her social security card, and a photocopy of her license, as well as personal information on her life, as well as a new credit card opened in her name. Leah begins to realize that Emmy was helping Bethany, who turned out to be her cousin.

The information that Leah finds is that Bethany had gone to prison for an arson-related homicide 8 years ago. Two people were involved in the fire, though Bethany hadn’t identified the second person, and nobody ever came forward with information leading to that person’s arrest. That other person could only have been Emmy, or whoever she actually was. When Bethany got out, Emmy had led Leah there in order to help her take over her identity due to the similarities in their appearances, going to slowly weed Leah out.

Leah leaves quickly, taking the information that she had found, and turns everything into Kyle, including telling him about her past. Back when she was a journalist, she had printed an article claiming that a college professor was involved in the suicides of 4 girls on campus, having drug them and their deaths happened shortly afterward. The reason why this was personal for Leah is because that professor was the boyfriend of her best friend and former roommate, Paige, who would later become her husband and father of her child. Leah believed that Aaron had drug her in an attempt to kill her, but something went wrong. The day after the article was printed, Aaron hung himself from the ceiling of her own home.

At the urging of her boss, Leah left her job and took the teaching job in Pennsylvania, and she has no intentions of returning to Boston. When Bethany is then taken off of life support, Leah believes she has hit a dead end, until she speaks with a man named Vince, who stated he slept with a woman named Melissa, or he thought he had, and his girlfriend Amelia had left him the day after they were found in bed together. Emmy had taken on the identity of Amelia in order to remain in her apartment, and this was when Emmy and Leah had met, Leah mistaking the name Ammi for Emmy.

Leah is able to uncover the truth, and eventually locates Emmy in an upstate New York home, owned by her deceased mother. Leah confronts her, and gives her the time to get away despite already having told Kyle where she was.

Discussion Questions

1. Evaluate the opening of the book. How does the author use the prologue to set up the story, foreshadow and create an immediate sense of suspense? How do elements of the setting contribute to an air of uncertainty and unease? What themes or motifs are introduced in this section? In all honesty, I didn’t really pay much attention to the opening of the book for this one.

2. Who narrates the story, and why do you think the author chose this narrator particularly? How did the choice of narrator influence or shape your reaction to the story? Would you say that the narrator is a reliable narrator? Why or why not? How did your assessment of the narrator change as the story progressed, and what caused these changes? Leah is the narrator of the story, as this story was about her and the events that led her down the path. At times, I couldn’t trust her to be a reliable narrator, especially when it came out that she had been basically stalking her old college roommate, especially after the death of her husband that she had, in an off-hand way, a hand in.

3. Why did Leah decide to leave Boston? What was her controversial article about, and why was it considered problematic? What rule or rules of journalism was Leah accused of breaking? Leah left Boston because she was protecting herself - she was the source used in the article, whose name she wouldn’t give away - because she wanted to see justice come to the 4 girls who had lost their lives when she hadn’t lost hers. Since she couldn’t technically be the source and write the article at the same time, she was putting her job on the line and her boss told her to quit, take her leave and don’t return, which she did.

4. In Chapter 7, Leah says, “I had long believed that life was not linear but cyclical. It was the way news stories worked, and history.” What does she mean by this? Do you agree with her? Why or why not? A news story always had a beginning, middle and an end. And the cycle would continue. Each new day was a story. Do I agree with her? To an extent.

5. Consider the theme of trust - or mistrust. Would you say that the characters in the novel are very trusting of one another or very mistrustful? What does trust seem to be built upon? Alternatively, what erodes the characters’ trust in one another? What does the novel ultimately seem to suggest about trust? Leah is too trusting. She trusted a girl she had only known for 3 months before she disappeared into the ether, and then openly put her trust into her again when she reappeared. She wanted to believe in the best of people, and that only got her hurt in the long run. Leah could no longer trust in the fact that Emmy was even a real person.

6. Mitch believes that the local police crime is due to the population doubling in size and the presence of outsiders, but what does the book suggest is more threatening - the unfamiliar or the familiar? Discuss. Mitch is a local, therefore all of these new faces can be jarring and it’s easy to put the blame for the uptick of crime in the community on the new people, new people bringing in terrible things. But, honestly, the familiar is what is scary. Take Davis Cobb - though he was innocent of what he was accused of, he could come off as predatory. it’s always the familiar faces in the crowd that cause the most unease.

7. What does Leah says is the desire of all mankind when it comes to stories? What, in her opinion, do people demand, and how does this influence the judgments and assements people make when faced with a msytery or the unknown? Where do we find examples of this in the text? Readers want the truth, and the nitty gritty of it all. We are naturally judgmental creatures by nature, so it is easy to put the wrong information out there and for it to be taken as fact.

8. Explore the theme of truth. Does the book ultimately indicate how one can discern what is true and what is not? Leah believes that the truth always rises to the surface like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. Do you agree with her? Explain. I do agree with her. Lies always have their way of catching up to the surface. Someone is eventually going to slip up and give away the fact that they’re lying. It’s too hard to keep up with the lies.

9. Leah believes that she has relocated to a place filled with people who share at least one thing in common with her. What does she believe is the commonality? What same commonality do Leah and Kyle share? That they were all running from their past. For Leah, she was running away from what had happened in Boston. For Kyle, he was running away from what happened in his previous case, trying to prove himself in a new location.

10. Do readers ever learn who the unnamed source was in Leah’s article? Why did Leah protect the source’s identity? In the final confrontation of the novel, why does Leah go on her own even though it endangers her? Whom does Leah beleive she owed it to? Leah never did say outloud that it was her that was listed as the unnamed source, but it was terribly obvious. She gave a false statement, therefore implicating a man who could have been completely innocent, though Leah didn’t believe so. Though her memory was fuzzy, she remembered enough details that could have implicated him greatly, and she wanted him to pay for what he had done to her in the past.

11. Leah’s mother believes that her daughter uses her talents to give a voice to the voiceless. Discuss the concept of the anonymous or voiceless victims that recurs throughout the novel. Who are these victims, and what do they share in common? Why, for instance, does Leah beleive that no one will pay attention to the ultimate fate of Bethany? How did Leah believe people would react if something happened to her or any other person staying at a motel? The victims are those that nobody cares about, like Bethany. She was a criminal, so nobody would pay any attention to her if she had gone missing. Nobody to report her as such. These are the people that nobody cares about and judges too quickly when something bad happens to them.

12. At the start of the story, Leah believed that fate had brought her and Emmy back together after several years apart, but as the story progresses, Leah’s point of view shifts and she says, “Things come back around because we go looking for them. That’s why they seem to pop back up over and over like fate.” Does this novel ultimately support or refute the idea of fate? Discuss. It supports the idea of fate. For Emmy, she returned because she needed something from Leah, though never came out and said it. Emmy’s return, for Leah, was the push she needed in order to uproot her life and move on.

I enjoyed this book until the end. There were several storylines happening at once, and some of them were just left opened and unfinished, and I feel like I didn’t get any closure. Take for example when Leah realizes that Paige had been in the home when she found her husband after his completed suicide, though she had told the police she had returned from errands with their baby to find him that way. We don’t find out anything after that, even after Leah goes to see Paige and Paige confronts her, but what happened after that was completely left out. I hated that!

3/5 stars.

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