Ten years ago on a school field trip two vans filled with two teachers and multiple students crashed into a ravine, leaving only nine students alive. Most of the survivors are not friends with each other, but the tragedy forges a bond between them that intensifies when a year after the disaster one of the survivors kills herself. To make sure none of them are alone again on the anniversary of the accident, the remaining eight survivors agree to spend the anniversary week together at a beach house. However, a decade on and survivor Cassidy Bent isn’t sure she wants to attend this year’s event. She has created a new life for herself, one that includes her boyfriend and not the seven people she was been forced into a relationship with where the only thing they have in common is a tragedy.

That is until she receives devastating news that another one of the survivors, Ian, killed himself and Cassidy finds herself speeding towards the beach house on the Outer Banks. But once she arrives she quickly notices that not everything is what it appears to be and when fellow survivor Amaya disappears on the first night of the week she begins to feel that something is amiss. As each survivor relieves the terrible events of that fateful day, secrets that they had attempted to buried resurface and as the clock ticks in their search for Amaya, the survivors are forced to ask themselves, is one of them a killer?

The premise of this thriller is very interesting and the beautiful color had my hooked. Ms. Miranda does a great job of building tension that continues to increases as the days and eventually the hours tick by. I also liked how she included chapters where the disaster is seen through each of the survivor’s eyes, painting a complicated picture of the events that transpired and why their decisions continue to haunt them ten years on. I also appreciated Ms. Miranda’s portrayal of Cassidy, who the story is told from as she created a character that is clearly suffering from PTSD and is blocking out critical memories that are revealed at the very end of the story, mainly how the accident actually occurred.

Despite Ms. Miranda’s excellent tension building and plot devices, I was underwhelmed by the conclusion of the story and who the killer was. Without revealing anything I can say that the conclusion felt like the ending I read in a book I read earlier this year, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead. While the endings are not identical, they do have a very similar plot point that, since I read Ms. Winstead’s book first, left me greatly wanting more out of The Only Survivors. Additionally, while I liked how Ms. Miranda included scenes of the disaster from each of the survivors’ point of view, the fate of two of the other students who eventually didn’t survive remains a bit of a mystery to me. I can guess what happened to them but they didn’t seem to fit in with the story of what happened. With the exception of the teachers who were killed immediately in the crash, I only know what happened to one of the other student victims and that’s because it was what the plot was centered around.

As a result this book left me a bit underwhelmed and I’m not sure if I would pick it up again in the future. It was a good concept that was executed fairly well but the ending could have been improved.

3 out of 5 stars