Riley Sager

Todd Ritter wanted a clean slate. His Kat Campbell mysteries, published 2010 to 2013, reviewed better than they sold, so for a new publisher he took the gender-neutral name Riley Sager and kept his author page free of a photograph. Final Girls came from Dutton in July 2017: Quincy Carpenter, the only person to walk out of a cabin in the woods alive, belongs to a trio the press files under that label, and her life splinters when a second survivor turns up at her door. Stephen King called it the first great thriller of 2017, and it won an International Thriller Writers award the following year. He has published one a year since, each a standalone that picks up a worn genre shape and turns it over: The Last Time I Lied at a summer camp, Lock Every Door in a Manhattan apartment building with impossible rules, Home Before Dark in a house whose ghost story was written by the narrator's father, Survive the Night in a car with a stranger, The Only One Left in a decaying mansion with a survivor who cannot speak.