Jennifer Palmer has read crime fiction since her teenage years & enjoys reviewing within the many sub-genres that now exist; as a historian who lectures on real life historical mysteries she particularly appreciates historical cime fiction.
Rebecca’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Ezra, has gone missing. However when she notifies the police, they seem surprisingly unconcerned. They suspect he’s been playing the ‘stranger game,’ a viral hit in which players start following others in real life, as they might otherwise do on social media. But as the game spreads, the rules begin to change, and disappearances are reported across the country.
The concept behind this book is very simple: what if people started following strangers in real life, the way they do on social media? There are three rules to the ‘stranger game’ (a) pick your subject at random; (b) never make contact and (c) never follow the same subject twice.
But as with anything that goes viral, as the rules change - it starts to get out of hand. In an attempt to find Ezra, Rebecca starts playing the ‘stranger game’, immersing herself in the murky world of this creepy game. She discovers that people are spending months away from home, cut off from their ‘real’ lives, travelling across the world all because the desire to follow strangers has become an obsession.
We all follow strangers online without a second thought, but reading about people doing it in the ‘real-world’ comes across as stalker-ish and creepy.
This inventive thriller throws out more questions than it answers, but it’s a thought-provoking read that might make you think twice the next time you start idly scrolling through your social media feed.
