Five Total Strangers

Five Total Strangers is a young adult thriller, a genre that concerns teenagers or young adults navigating suspenseful and mysterious circumstances. The main character, Mira, chooses to ride with four strangers to her home in Philadelphia after a snowstorm grounds all flights out of Newark. Unbeknownst to Mira, these strangers include a person who has been obsessed with Mira for a year.

Richards’s novel uses several common thriller tropes. The first is including a remorseless and brilliant criminal who manipulates his victims to commit his crimes. In Five Total Strangers, this figure is Josh, the person stalking Mira. Josh persuades the others to change the route of the road trip from a flat landscape to a mountain route following Interstate 80. This puts in motion a series of events that endanger and further isolate Mira and the other passengers.

Richards also engages with the trope of the femme fatale, or an attractive, dangerous woman with hidden or ulterior motives. Kayla’s character is mysterious and morally ambiguous, her addiction to drugs making her more easily manipulated. At the end of the novel, it emerges that Kayla knew Josh was the stalker and helped him because he offered her medication to keep her withdrawal symptoms under control when her drugs went missing.

Richards sets her novel in various remote locations, another thriller trope. By placing Mira and her companions in an SUV, Richards isolates them and creates an environment where Josh can torment and manipulate them. The claustrophobic setting also allows the stalker to create a sense of distrust among the companions and lay blame on an innocent person, which is the trope of a closed circle of suspects. There are only five people in the SUV, and only one of them could be stealing items. The atmosphere becomes even more isolated as access to cell phones is removed and the characters must use a paper map.

Richards uses an unreliable narrator, another trope of the thriller genre. Mira is not willfully deceptive, but she is focused on her mother’s grief as the anniversary of her aunt’s death approaches. Upon learning her mother is also facing a divorce, Mira becomes so anxious about her mother that she makes decisions she might not have made under other circumstances to get home quickly. Mira also notices a man who appears at each stop the SUV makes and associates him with danger because of the way he smells. Though subtle, these perceptions and decisions illustrate Mira’s skewed perspective, which she admits at the end of the novel was inaccurate because of her Unexplored Grief.