Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Escape Room!
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for inviting me on the blog tour!
Special thanks to Megan Goldin, St. Martin’s Press, and NetGalley for the privilege of previewing this book in exchange for an honest review.
Publish Date: July 30, 2019
“Sure, there’s no ‘i’ in team, but there is an ‘m’ and an ‘e’.” — Kevin Myers
Vincent, Jules, Sylvie, and Sam are ruthlessly ambitious high-flyers working in the lucrative world of Wall Street finance where deception and intimidation thrive. Getting rich is all that matters, and they’ll do anything to reach the top.
When they are ordered to participate in a corporate team-building exercise that requires them to escape from a locked elevator, dark secrets of their team begin to be laid bare.
The biggest mystery to solve in this lethal game: What happened to Sara Hall? Once a young shining star—now “gone but not forgotten”.
This is no longer a game.
They’re fighting for their lives.
An escape room is a game in which players are “locked” in rooms to solve puzzles and riddles using clues, hints, and creativity. Players are given a set time limit to solve the puzzle or riddle. Games have themes such as haunted houses, science labs, prison cells, dungeons, and space stations.
Usually, people go willingly into an escape room, but this is not the case for Vincent, Jules, Sylvie, and Sam. They are lured in the escape room from hell, with the “elevator” theme, laced with cryptic clues and trapped until they finish their challenges. Who put them there, and why?
The story opens up with a very suspenseful and dramatic scene that had me engaged right away. Vincent, Jules, Sylvie, and Sam are slick, savvy, cunning, and vile people that work in the dog-eat-dog environment of Wall Street. They work hard, play hard, and they are fascinating.
This book is about greed, murder, lust, wealth, secrets, manipulation, creativity, sexism, entitlement, and selfishness. It’s an inside peek into the glitz and glamour of Wall Street and the pressures and high stakes of the banking world. I loved it and I couldn’t get enough. The extravagance and culture of big financial firms is reflected realistically in my opinion, and made the story very believable.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“Welcome to the escape room. Your goal is simple. Get out alive.”
“Who the hell brings a loaded Glock to a work meeting?”
“Success is not for the squeamish.”
“Money, he learned, absolved even the guiltiest conscience.”
“The scarcest resource in the world is time.”
“The firm took precedence over everything, we had to be available as and when we were needed, short of a birth, death, or marriage. And sometime even then.”
“They’d sell out their grandma in a heartbeat if that’s what it took to cut a deal or get a promotion.”
The book has two storylines – the present day with 4 colleagues trapped in an elevator, and Sara Hall’s story. Flipping between the two stories kept me engaged, as opposed to staying within the trapped elevator for the entire book. I loved how the 2 stories were woven into each other in the past and present. It helped me to understand each character’s motivations and justifications. The writing created a creepy, foreboding feel to being stuck in a hot and humid elevator, and builds a nail-biting suspenseful atmosphere.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars 
This book has all of the elements of a standout book for me: complex characters that you love to hate, great backstories, a study of sins, mystery, suspense, and multiple storylines that weave together by the end. This writing has a cinematic feel to it and I hope it turns into a movie. I highly recommend this book – don’t miss it!
Buy the book here.
Read This, Not That 
I must get this now…thank you!
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