Good premises can come easy; sustaining them across a novel's length is the trick. Martin Griffin does precisely this, and then some, in The Second Stranger, a Misery-evoking debut thriller set in the blizzard-blasted Scottish Highlands.
As the novel opens, 30-something narrator Remie Yorke has begun her final shift as night manager of the Mackinnon, a tucked-away Highlands hotel. She's the only staff on the premises until morning, and after the last two guests leave, the Mackinnon will close until spring and she'll be off to Chile to realize a travel dream: "my final shift felt like it was the start of something." That's one way of putting it. While Storm Ezra is blasting away, a man arrives, telling her he's PC Gaines of Police Scotland: he's been in an accident, his radio is down, and he needs the phone--a dangerous criminal from the nearby jail has escaped during a prisoner transport. Not long afterward, another man claiming to be Gaines arrives at the hotel.
Remie's effort to determine which man is the imposter consumes the first chunk of The Second Stranger, after which the novel tracks her as she figures out her next moves. The result is a thriller as pure as the snow that tries to thwart the book's tiny cast, putting them through both physical and psychological endurance tests. Griffin adroitly metes out Remie's remembrances of her late convict brother, gradually clueing in readers to the idea that something besides her life is at stake. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer