The Survivor by Andrew Reid

Published by Minotaur Books on March 24, 2026

The best thrillers tell stories of ordinary people who are thrust into extraordinary situations. I enjoy thrillers about tough guys who use their superheroic tough guy skills to outpunch and outgun bad guys, but they never have the impact of thrillers that require ordinary people to gain courage or make other changes that will help them defeat evil.

Ben Cross is not an ordinary person, but he’s not a tough guy. He might not even be one of the good guys. He initially seems to be a young man who is down on his luck. Ben appears to have been lured into a dangerous situation for reasons he doesn’t understand. Only as the story progresses does the reader learn that Ben is not necessarily the innocent victim he appears to be. To survive, Ben must come to terms with his past and find the courage to seize control of his life.

The novel’s premise is simple. Ben met a contact at a job fair who invited him to an interview for a boring but well-paid office position that would embroil him in a world of spreadsheets. Ben wanted a fresh start and was thrilled to be offered the job, but he was fired on his first day.

Ben walks to the subway, wondering whether he will lose the deposit on his new apartment. While Ben is riding on the train, someone texts him a photo of a man whose throat has been slit. Additional messages insist that Ben knows the sender and imply that the sender knows about Ben’s past.

Ben then receives a picture of another subway passenger. The accompanying message tells him that if he allows the man to leave the train, the man will die. Ben assumes he’s being pranked so he does nothing when the man departs at the next stop. The man takes only a few steps into the station before someone shoots him.

Further texts tell Ben not to get off the train, not to block the sender’s number, not to ignore the sender’s messages. Ben follows those instructions because he wants to learn what’s happening. He receives another picture with another instruction not to let the passenger leave the train. Ben finds the woman in the photo and tries to persuade her to listen, but she assumes he is dangerous and other passengers restrain him as she leaves. An explosion soon follows.

The novel’s other central character is Detective Kelly Hendricks. Kelly is a police detective who recently threw a police chief across a table after he put his hand on her butt. She was rewarded with a career-ending assignment as liaison to the Transit Authority. She describes the job as “following the mole people around on the subway.”

Kelly is on her way to the subway when she hears gunshots and sees people fleeing from the subway tunnels. The train is gone but the victim’s lifeless body is on the ground. When an explosion occurs at another station, Kelly makes her way there to discover that Homeland Security is leading the investigation. The agent in charge is rooting for a bigger explosion to impress upon the citizenry the threat of terrorism — particularly if he can take credit for capturing the bomber.

The train stops after the explosion. The rest of the story follows Kelly as she boards the train, tries to figure out Ben’s role in the crime, and jousts with Homeland Security about the proper role of law enforcement. In the process, she learns that Ben’s father is a serial killer and that Ben is carrying a dark secret about an event that occurred when he was eleven.

Is Ben a good guy or a bad guy? During most of the novel, I was undecided. Preserving that ambiguity for so long assures that the reader remains engaged with the plot.

Someone clearly wants to make trouble for Ben, but the identity of that person comes as a genuine surprise. While Ben’s dad suffers from obvious mental health problems, the story asks whether a victim's intense desire for revenge might itself be a form of mental illness.

The plot is implausible but no more so than is typical of a modern crime novel. The story’s rapid pace, avoidance of formulaic plotting, and reliance on ordinary people to carry the story makes it easy to recommend.

Andrew Reid’s prose is vivid. I’m inured to the violence in crime fiction but I found a horrific chapter difficult to read. Fortunately, I had that reaction only to one brief scene. Sensitive readers might want to give The Survivor a pass. For thriller fans who have the stomach for it, novel’s blend of psychological and actual horror makes this one of the more chilling crime stories I’ve encountered in recent memory.

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