Five Total Strangers is a young adult thriller, a genre that concerns teenagers or young adults navigating suspenseful and mysterious circumstances. The main character, Mira, chooses to ride with four strangers to her home in Philadelphia after a snowstorm grounds all flights out of Newark. Unbeknownst to Mira, these strangers include a person who has been obsessed with Mira for a year.

Richards’s novel uses several common thriller tropes. The first is including a remorseless and brilliant criminal who manipulates his victims to commit his crimes. In Five Total Strangers, this figure is Josh, the person stalking Mira. Josh persuades the others to change the route of the road trip from a flat landscape to a mountain route following Interstate 80. This puts in motion a series of events that endanger and further isolate Mira and the other passengers.

Richards also engages with the trope of the femme fatale, or an attractive, dangerous woman with hidden or ulterior motives. Kayla’s character is mysterious and morally ambiguous, her addiction to drugs making her more easily manipulated. At the end of the novel, it emerges that

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