The plot twist involving a doctor on his way to Phoenix, Arizona (above, in 1963) who picks up a young female hitchhiker in The Expendable Man (1963) by Dorothy B. Hughes makes the thriller impossible to film, so it must be read. Dorothy B. Hughes also wrote In a Lonely Place (1947) which was turned into a classic film noir in 1950 with Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart.