The Hitchhikers
A Novel
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Chevy Stevens, the beloved New York Times bestselling author of Still Missing and Those Girls, returns with her most breathtaking thriller yet.
With its relentless pace and unforgettable twists, The Hitchhikers delivers what bestselling author Karin Slaughter calls “a frightening and viscerally chilling road-trip-gone-wrong story.”
Desperation is a dark road…
It’s the summer of 1976. Alice and Tom set out on the remote Canadian highways in their new RV, hoping to heal after a devastating tragedy.
They’ve planned the trip perfectly, every detail accounted for. Then they meet two young hitchhikers and offer them a ride. But Simon and Jenny aren’t what they seem. They’ve left a trail of blood, destruction, and madness behind them.
Now Alice and Tom are prisoners in a deadly game with nowhere to turn. As the tension builds, the lines blur, and the question becomes:
In whose heart does evil truly lie? What secrets are Jenny and Simon hiding? And who will live another day?
A chilling, twist-laden ride to the final page, The Hitchhikers is that rare novel that will break your heart as it holds you in suspense.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A disparate pair of couples plays out a deadly road trip game in Chevy Stevens’ pulse-pounding thriller. Looking for a fresh start after a period of personal strife, Tom and Alice hit the Canadian highways in their RV. Their fateful decision to offer a ride to young drifters Simon and Jenny unexpectedly kicks off a hellish fight to survive the encounter. Setting the action in the summer of 1976 adds a low-tech twist, while Stevens parlays the close quarters of the road into an ingenious turn on the conventional Stockholm syndrome. The bonding between Alice and her much younger captor unearths backstories for both women that are heartbreaking for radically different reasons. Meanwhile, periodic bursts of unsparing violence make the stakes remain high until the startling end. By giving equal weight to physical and psychological pain, The Hitchhikers supplies retro thrills layered with emotional heft.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young couple's summer road trip curdles into a hellish hostage situation in this tense but hollow outing from bestseller Stevens (Dark Roads). In 1976, 20-somethings Alice and Tom are driving a rented RV from Seattle to Montreal in hopes of rekindling their marriage after the death of their newborn son. At a Canadian campground, they bump into a younger couple who identify themselves as Ocean and Blue. A gregarious Tom invites the apparent hippies to travel with them for a few nights, but then, while skimming a convenience store newspaper, Alice learns that the pair are runaways named Simon and Jenny, who fled the Vancouver suburbs after killing Jenny's parents. When Simon discovers Alice has found them out, he takes her and Tom hostage and embarks on a chain of robberies that culminate in tragedy. Stevens constructs some rousing set pieces, including a memorable showdown with a cult leader, but the mayhem plateaus early, only regaining momentum in the book's final act before everything arrives at a preposterous conclusion. Glimpses of a more intriguing novel emerge—particularly during flashbacks to Jenny's bleak upbringing—but too often, Stevens merely plods from one fistfight to another. Thriller fans should hitch a ride elsewhere.
