DON'T TURN AROUND

Two very different women find themselves in a fight for their lives in Barry’s adrenaline-spiked sophomore thriller.

Austin bartender and aspiring journalist Cait Monaghan couldn't have known a disastrous one-night stand with an up-and-coming country musician would change her life. Cait is shocked when the guy wraps his hands around her throat during sex and chokes her until she nearly passes out. When Cait posts an anonymous piece about the experience online, it’s a hit, but she’s eventually outed as the author. Sympathy inevitably falls on the guy’s side, and her life and livelihood are threatened. The vitriol of it all inspires her to seek out something different, and she volunteers with the Sisters of Service, who help women in crisis. Cait is to drive her new client, the imminently poised Rebecca McRae, from Lubbock to an Albuquerque clinic, but once they hit the road in Cait’s ancient Jeep, they realize that someone seems determined to make sure they don’t make it in one piece. Both women are hiding secrets, and Cait is convinced that the man menacing them with his pickup truck is after her, but Rebecca is equally convinced that she’s his target. As the attacks escalate, Cait and Rebecca must work together to survive their hellish road trip, and Barry builds a believable bond between the two women, born of both necessity and something deeper. The present-day narrative is cut with tidbits from each woman’s life, and Barry gets inside the heads of men both intimately and peripherally connected to them, offering a disturbing glimpse at what drives men to horrible extremes as well as the constant sacrifices, big and small, that women are expected to make for them. Barry’s electric, perfectly paced tale reads like the gritty lovechild of Thelma and Louise and Spielberg’s Duel, and readers will cheer for Cait and Rebecca all the way to the end of the road.

An action-packed and fiercely feminist big-screen–ready chiller.