The Escape Room by Megan Goldin

Vincent, Sam, Sylvie, and Jules have been called to a last minute meeting. A last minute, mandatory meeting at that. They arrive at a random office building in the middle of nowhere, South Bronx, and are told they're going to participate in a team building exercise—an escape room. 

What was supposed to be an hour long detour in each of their evenings, stretches out much longer than expected. Trapped in an elevator with a series of clues to unravel before they can leave, the coworkers, all team members at a highly competitive investment firm, quickly find themselves at each others throats. Each new riddle leads to more and more explosive revelations and it soon becomes clear that this is not about team building at all. 

The Escape Room is an absolute edge of your seat read!

Escape rooms have become more and more popular with each passing month and have entered into pop culture in what has to be the most expected, sinister way—as fodder for horror movies and thrillers. Because what sounds more fun than being trapped with a bunch of people trying to untangle clues and riddles before you can leave, right?

Goldin's tale alternates chapters between the four in the elevator, present, and a woman named Sara Hall. Unemployed and desperate, Sara has run through a series of interviews at a series of investment firms to no end. Until she catches a lucky break that gets her hired at Stanhope and Sons. The very firm Vincent, Sam, Sylvie, and Jules work at. In fact, along with one other employee, Lucy, they make up the very team Sara works alongside.

But Sara and Lucy are conspicuously missing from the escape room antics, which is just the first of many twists of the novel.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. The pacing was excellent and those twists kept me intrigued throughout. I just had to know what was going to happen next!

This is Goldin's debut release stateside. The Australian native has one previous release that hasn't made its way here as of yet, but I certainly hope that it will. What's more, I'll be looking forward to more from her down the road!

As an aside, I had the chance to listen to this one on audio thanks to Libro.fm and, if audiobooks are your jam, I absolutely recommend it! The audio features two narrators: Ramon de Ocampo and January LaVoy (LaVoy reads Sara's chapters and Ocampo reads the rest).