Mira has to get home for Christmas. She chose to study art in California, despite being only a senior in high school, but now it’s Christmas Eve and she has to get home to Pittsburgh. But when the plane starts hitting bad turbulence on their landing in New Jersey, she worries that her connecting flight may be grounded. The college student sitting next to her on the plane, Harper, is also trying to get home for Christmas. The two girls bonded on the flight, especially when the plane started bouncing. But they do land safely.

Only, it doesn’t help them much, as everything in Newark is grounded. There are no flights getting out. Other passengers are trying to find a free plug to charge their electronics and a cot to sleep on. Mira isn’t sure what she’s going to do,. It wasn’t that long ago that she had lost her aunt to cancer, her mother’s twin sister Phoebe, and Mira remembers how her mother had fallen apart. Then Mira had gone across the country to study, leaving her mother behind. She does not want to miss Christmas with her mother. It’s too important.

Then Harper shows back up with a Christmas Eve miracle—she managed to rent a car. It will be full, as there are three others already in the car, but the SUV will fit five relatively comfortably. Mira’s not sure about driving through the blizzard with four strangers, but it feels like it’s her only way to get home quickly. She agrees, and the five of them get into the SUV and start heading towards Pennsylvania.

The roads start out relatively clean, the snow barely falling. Mira meets the rest of the carmates—Brecken, Josh, and Kayla. But as the miles go by and the snow starts to pile up on the roads, Mira starts to wonder about the people she’s trapped in the car with. They stop at a rest area and decide it’s a good time to put the chains on the tires, but when they pull them out and look at them, they realize that the chains are unusable.

It’s strange, but they decide to keep on anyway. But a near miss at a big multi-car pile-up causes them all to rethink the highway they’re on. The other highway will take them through the mountains, but it seems like the storm hasn’t hit there yet. The roads might be safer, allowing them to make better time for a while.

But then things start to go missing in the car, and Mira realizes that the danger isn’t just out there, on the snowy roads. The danger is sitting right there with them all. She stops worrying so much about getting home for Christmas, and she starts to wonder if she’ll get home at all.

Five Total Strangers is a creepy holiday thriller that raises the stakes continually through the pages of the story. Author Natalie D. Richards is no stranger to suspense, and she demonstrates her expertise with the genre in chapter after chapter, building the unease until you feel it twisting in your own gut, even if you’re reading this on a beach in July or (like me) at your desk at work over your lunch hour.

I had a genuinely tough time setting this book aside to get back to work. I could feel the tension in my shoulders (even now as I write this I can feel it again, it was so raw) and desperately wanted to keep reading to find out what was happening in that car and what would happen next. Each of the characters had secrets, each had a deeper reason for being there, and it’s really difficult to figure out the source (sources?) of the tension until Richards finally let us in on the whole story. Creepy, compelling, and impossible to stop thinking about. Five Total Strangers is a truly masterful thriller.

A copy of Five Total Strangers was provided by Sourcebooks Fire through their Early Reads program, with many thanks.