‘The Second Stranger’ (2023) by Martin Griffin, narrated by Tamsin Kennard

One detective. One murderer. But which is which?
Remie Yorke has one shift left at the Mackinnon Hotel in the remote Scottish Highlands before she leaves for good. Then Storm Ezra hits.
As temperatures plummet and phone lines go down, an injured man stumbles inside. PC Don Gaines was in a terrible accident on the mountain road. The only other survivor: the prisoner his team was transporting.
When a second stranger arrives, Remie reluctantly lets him in from the blizzard. He, too, is hurt. He claims to be a police officer. His name is also Don Gaines.
Someone is lying and, with no means of escape, Remie must work out who. If the cold doesn’t kill her, one of these men will get there first…

IN A NUTSHELL
A clever and original thriller that is much more complex than the initial premise suggests. Most of the novel was entertaining, suspenseful, and often surprising, but the middle section dragged a little, perhaps because the author held onto the initial mystery for too long. The ending was satisfying. This was an accomplished debut novel by an author I’ll be following in the future.

I was immediately engaged with the story in ‘The Second Stranger‘. The setting was perfect: a remote hotel by a lake in the Scottish mountains on the last day of the season, enveloped in Storm Ezra. The story was told by a lone hotel employee, Rennie Yorke, looking after the last two guests on her final shift before she leaves for a trip to Chile. It’s clear from the start that she’s someone with a backstory and an agenda but we get little time to learn about that before the first mystery of the story is triggered: two injured men emerge from the storm, an hour or so apart, each claiming to be a police officer in search of a convict who has escaped from a crashed prison transport vehicle. Rennie must decide which one of them is lying.

The tension at the beginning was palpable. I couldn’t make my mind up which of the two men was the policeman and which was the convict. I also couldn’t see how that tension could be maintained for a whole novel. It also seemed that there were too many coincidences in the plot.

Towards the middle of the book, it seemed to me that the story lost its edge for awhile. The which-one-is-the-bad-guy question was sustained for a little too long, and I began to lose interest.

Then, just as the answer was revealed, several dramatic things happened at once, pulling me back into the story, which had now become an action-packed struggle for survival.

This struggle brought into focus the bits and pieces that I’d learned about Rennie’s backstory. It also made it clear that what had appeared as improbable coincidences were actually attributes of a larger, more complex plot with Rennie at its centre.

The action scenes were vivid and compelling. The larger plot was more interesting and created more tension than Rennie’s original pick-the-real-policeman challenge.

The ending was bold, clever, and satisfying.

I’ll be adding Marin Griffin’s second novel ‘The Last Visitor‘ (2024), to my TBR pile soon.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘The Second Stranger’. Tamsin Kennard did a great job with the narration. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.