Riley Sager’s Final Girls follows three notorious survivors whose lives have been shaped—and warped—by the violence that made them famous. In a world obsessed with the “Final Girl” myth, rescue and exploitation blur, and the people closest to these women become either anchors to normalcy or architects of further harm. The cast forms a web of mentorships, false identities, and predatory “protections” that explode into a reckoning with memory and truth.
Main Characters
Quincy Carpenter
Quincy is the novel’s narrator and the lone survivor of the Pine Cottage massacre, now living in New York and curating a careful, sugar-dusted normalcy through her baking blog. Plagued by dissociative amnesia and anxious routines, she appears composed while quietly stealing small objects to tether herself to the present. When a woman arrives claiming to be Samantha Boyd, Quincy is jolted into a collision course with the past, her fragile peace splintering after news of Lisa Milner’s death. Through fraught ties to Jeff, the steady boyfriend who embodies the life she wants, and to Coop, the “savior” who engineered her dependence, Quincy’s story becomes a fight to own her narrative. By the time she revisits Pine Cottage, she forces her memories to the surface, unmasks the true killer, and reclaims her identity—not as a myth, but as a survivor who chooses herself.
Tina Stone (posing as Samantha Boyd)
Tina is the disruptive impostor whose arrival detonates the plot, slipping into the persona of the elusive Samantha Boyd to infiltrate Quincy’s life. Sharp, volatile, and fiercely loyal to Joe Hannen, she stages confrontations and engineered chaos to pry open Quincy’s amnesia, believing the truth about Pine Cottage will clear Joe’s name. Her survivalist instincts—shaped by an abusive past and a stint at Blackthorn Psychiatric Hospital—create a twisted kinship with Quincy, who recognizes in Tina both a provocation and a reflection of her own suppressed rage. As Tina’s lies peel back to reveal a brutal sort of integrity, her mission converges with Quincy’s awakening. In the climactic return to Pine Cottage, she is mortally wounded by Coop but helps Quincy end him, achieving the justice she wanted even as it costs her life.
Franklin Cooper (Coop)
Coop masquerades as Quincy’s stoic rescuer and guardian while secretly being the architect of her trauma—the Pine Cottage killer and the novel’s true predator. He cultivates dependency with paternal charm and quiet menace, fetishizing Final Girls as creations he can admire, control, and ultimately destroy. His reach extends beyond Quincy to the other famous survivors, drawing Lisa Milner and Samantha Boyd into deceptive relationships that turn deadly when they edge too close to the truth. The mask slips as Quincy’s memories return and Lisa’s investigation echoes from beyond the grave, exposing Coop’s pattern of manipulation, stalking, and murder. In a final reversal of his maker-muse fantasy, Quincy kills him, collapsing the myth of the savior cop and severing the bond that kept her trapped.
Supporting Characters
Jeff Richards
Jeff Richards is Quincy’s longtime boyfriend, a public defender whose patience and pragmatism symbolize the “normal life” she thinks she wants. His skepticism of “Sam” and insistence on clear boundaries make him a moral counterweight to the escalating chaos. Loving but increasingly shut out by Quincy’s secrets, Jeff becomes the last safe harbor she must leave in order to face and integrate the truth.
Lisa Milner
Lisa Milner is the most public-facing Final Girl, a bestselling author and mentor who turns survival into advocacy. Her murder is the spark that reignites Quincy’s buried memories and exposes the hidden ties binding the Final Girls to Coop. Determined and inquisitive to a fault, Lisa’s off-page investigation—and her past entanglement with Coop—propel the story even after her death.
Joe Hannen
Joe Hannen is the scapegoat of Pine Cottage, a shy, socially awkward patient who wanders onto the scene and becomes the perfect red herring. His bond with Tina at Blackthorn fuels her entire masquerade, while his brief, painful encounter with Quincy the night of the massacre becomes one of her most repressed memories. Joe’s presence haunts the narrative as the innocence Tina gambles everything to prove.
Minor Characters
- Janelle Bennett: Quincy’s best friend, murdered at Pine Cottage; her betrayal with Craig is a flashpoint memory that fractures Quincy’s self-image.
- Craig, Amy, Rodney, and Betz: Quincy’s college friends killed at Pine Cottage, whose deaths anchor the trauma that defines the novel.
- Jonah Thompson: A tabloid reporter and Quincy’s former classmate who trades information, exposing the “Samantha Boyd” imposture in exchange for scoops.
- Detective Carmen Hernandez: A sharp NYPD investigator whose assault case pressures Quincy and Tina, threatening to unravel their lies.
- Nancy Scott: Lisa’s protective state trooper counterpart, mirroring Coop’s role in Quincy’s life but without the rot beneath.
- Sheila Carpenter: Quincy’s mother, committed to appearances and suppression, urging her daughter to keep the past sealed rather than examined.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The Final Girls triad is bound by notoriety and need: Quincy recoils from the spotlight Lisa embraced, while Tina weaponizes the myth to blow open a cover-up. Quincy and Tina clash, circle, and ultimately collaborate; Tina’s provocations force Quincy to name her anger, and Quincy’s emerging clarity reframes Tina’s deception as a brutal form of care. Lisa’s lingering influence—her mentorship of Quincy and her suspicion of the impostor—links the women even after death, uniting them in a common enemy.
“Protection” operates as both comfort and control. Quincy’s decades-long reliance on Coop masks a predatory bond in which he scripts her life and isolates her from the truth. Jeff offers genuine safety through honesty and limits, but his normalcy cannot hold while Quincy refuses to reckon with the past; their relationship strains as she moves toward confrontation rather than escape.
The Pine Cottage circle—Janelle, Craig, Amy, Rodney, Betz—functions as the human cost of Coop’s obsession, their lost futures haunting Quincy’s recovery. Joe Hannen sits at the center of misdirection: to Quincy, he is a traumatic memory she must revisit; to Tina, he is the friend whose innocence she is determined to prove. These overlapping loyalties and secrets drive the novel’s alliances—Quincy with Jeff and then, reluctantly, with Tina—toward a final alignment against Coop, where truth dismantles the myths that kept him hidden.