I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
Thanks NetGalley!

The book is based on the popular theme of escapes rooms. It's being used a team building activity for a bunch of co-workers... as they're all stuffe dinto the elevator to get TO the escape room, they soon realize that this isn't the basic escape room they thought. Theyu're stuck in the elevator and have to use cryptic clues to get out... soon dark secrets come out. Will they survive?

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my copy of The Escape Room by Megan Goldin in exchange for an honest review! The Escape Room is a psychological thriller due for publication on May 28,2019. I'm still not entirely sure how I felt about this book. On one hand, I enjoyed it because it was an easy read and was extremely fast paced. On the other hand, the ending is so utterly unrealistic that I found myself almost laughing out loud at it all. I do appreciate a book that requires little to no thought involved, and that's exactly what this book was. This is a good one to read if you have time to kill and enjoy something fast paced.

The Escape Room. This was an edge of the seat read for me. I could not put this book down. Megan Goldin did such an amazing job writing this title and developing characters and plot. I have already recommended this title to a good friend!

Ughh. I don’t know. This book was incredibly predictable for me but I’m thinking maybe it was supposed to be? The way the story was told and the clues we’re given throughout kind of give everything away. I had it figured out at around 40% completion. I didn’t take this book to be a “mystery” so much as a thriller. It was definitely thrilling. I was curious to see where the story was going and what would become of all the characters. Few of the characters are very likable or have any redeeming qualities. Which was fine actually. I like a good gritty cast of characters because that usually trips me up. But, again, this wasn’t a mystery.

This book is about revenge. It’s about people who are only looking out for themselves and care little about the welfare of others. It’s about secrets so big that they could ruin lives. It’s about getting back at those who have done you wrong. It’s about getting back at those who have done others wrong.

There wasn’t one of those big twists at the end that leave you gaping. It was just one of those endings that left you complacent. It left you to wonder how two particular characters ended up faring in the long run once the novel was at a close. I have some ideas, but…

The other thing that was tripping me up was the way this book was narrated. In the beginning of my notes for this book I assumed the narration would be told by Sara and Sam. I soon learned that every main character in this book gets to narrate their own story. Some accounts are told in first person and some switch to third. So that was a little confusing until I got the hang of how it was written.

I LOVE a good revenge story but I wanted more out of that ending. The book was super exciting, don’t get me wrong. However, if you’re looking for something believable, this book isn’t for you. But it was definitely enjoyable. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy picking this up to read it every day because I did. I just wanted more. This book left me wanting a lot. Which is sometimes a good thing but this time, for me at least, it was a neutral feeling. At the end I just thought to myself, “Well… alright. That’s that.” Nothing stuck with me. Nothing kept me thinking afterwards. Once I was done reading, I was just… done. On to the next.

This is definitely an enjoyable book though and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good thriller. Especially is you like a good revenge thriller. Then this is definitely for you.

I feel like I’ve said a lot of negative things about this book but I want you to know that I really did enjoy reading this! It just didn’t do anything for me. It came to a point where I was just reading to see how my theories came to be true. (Because I was 98% sure I was right in where I thought the story was heading.)

Anyway, I do recommend! Just don’t go into this expecting there to be twists and gasping moments. There really aren’t any. This is just one of those slow burner thrillers where you’re left to wonder why it’s happening. For me, though, I had the what, who, why and how figured out fairly quickly.

Genre: Mystery
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Pub. Date: July 30, 2019

A publicist from St. Martin’s Press contacted me to read and review this book, which I find hard to review. The plot is simple and predictable, not to mention implausible. The twist is a cinch to figure out and yet, interestingly, I enjoyed the story. Possibly, this is because most of the story could be straight out of the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” which I, and most moviegoers, thoroughly enjoyed. (If you are too young to know the film, google it).

I would say that the book is more a psychological thriller than a mystery. The novel reveals the cut-throat world of Wall Street corporate finance, where greed and corruption rule. Four hot-shot financial dealers work and live in a world of million-dollar salaries—designer everything. We are talking $11,000 for a pocketbook to be bought in numerous colors. And all four would turn on their grandmother to ensure they keep their million-dollar salaries. Think of the character Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street.” Gekko says to the young new financial advisor, "The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do." And these four have done some horrible things to ensure they have numerous $10,000 wristwatches. I thought the author did overkill in writing about their ridiculous spending habits but she proved her point. These four coworkers, who you will love to hate, are summoned into an elevator in the belief that they are engaging in some sort of team-building exercise. The reader knows from the prologue that bullet shots are heard from the elevator. It is not a team-building experience but a revenge plot against the four.

There are two timelines in the novel told in the first and third person. The four characters trapped in the elevator are told in the third person. The second timeline follows a young woman who graduated at the top of her class with an MBA. She sacrifices food and all her savings to buy an interview suit to look the part for a job in a top-tier finance company. She gets the job and works as the bottom link with the hot-shots. Her narrative is a bit boring. The author clearly wants a good vs. evil theme so, I guess, she is needed to have a moral character in the story. What kept my attention, even when things got a bit tedious, is just how horrible the other four actually are. How far would they go to ensure their hefty bonuses? This one is unquestionably movie material. If you go in knowing the novel’s flaws, you will be able to enjoy the elevator ride.

Wow I have always been afraid to go to an escape room and now I know why!! This book is soo good and will keep you up late into the night on the edge of ur seat!! This is a must read and maybe just maybe I will try an escape room!

While the premise is fascinating, I simply cannot say that I really liked this book. It was okay, but not as good as I’d hoped.
It was easy for me to tell that this is a debut novel, because Goldin’s writing definitely needs some polishing. Her analogies were often trite, and she used several phrases over and over (and not in a good way). And the ending left me wanting. I felt like she wrapped everything so nicely in a story where nothing was really nice, that for me, the ending didn’t fit with the rest of the book.
In the end, there was only one character that I found the least bit sympathetic, and (minor spoiler alert, because she tells you rather early on) she was dead. Unfortunately, this story made me lose any respect I had for high-stakes investment bankers (which, admittedly, wasn’t much to begin with). I just wasn’t very impressed. Bummer.
Want to find out for yourself whether or not you’d like this debut psychological thriller? You’ll have to wait a bit, because its release is scheduled for July 30, 2019.
Thanks anyway to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the digital ARC of this novel for review purposes. I obviously was not required to give a positive review. All opinions are my very own!

Whoa! I had no idea what I was in for when I started The Escape Room. It's set in the world of finance with competition and back stabbing being the game they play.
This was more than that. It was fast paced and entertaining. I'm looking forward to more from Megan Goldin.

Megan Goldin hits it out the park with her novel The Escape Room. Most people are already apprehensive when getting on an elevator, you might want to take the stairs from here on out. Sara Hall is a brilliant and newly graduated with an MBA. She lands the dream job and her life is just as she’d dreamed. But can she trust her co-workers? Sylvie, Jule, Sam and Vincent are our to make money for the firm and live the good life. How far will the go to achieve their goals. I really enjoyed this book, had to stay up late to finish it. Read it, you’ll enjoy it. I look forward to more from this author.

An ideal beach read for those yearning to escape the confines of corporate business-as-usual. An adrenaline-rushing, page-turning novel wherein several characters are trapped in an elevator and must reckon with competitive egos, regrets, and other emotional hijinks. Impossible to figure out who masterminded the trap. High-stakes finance meets sexual politics in a tower where power brokers will do anything to get to--and stay on--the top. Well-crafted prose and complicated characters rendered by author Megan Goldin, who is a former Reuters and AP journalist.

I went into this book pretty much blindly and was definitely entertained. I got sucked right in with these characters that are high octane and only out to succeed money wise. These are the elite of Wall Street and they are money hungry. How far will they go to push themselves to the ultimate success?

The Escape Room is told in multiple POVs. Sara Hall is the past and she is how we get a taste of who all the characters are. Her POV shows us each "player" at Stanhope within their little team. And their team doesn't seem to have any redeeming qualities. Each person is there to make money and put in endless hours to prove their worth. Through her eyes I saw the ugliness of power and the way women are treated in the workplace compared to men. It wasn't a pretty sight.

The Elevator is the present and there we have Sylvie, Vincent, Sam and Jules. They are the four remaining people of the Stanhope team that were brought to the elevator for a team building "Escape Room". These people are the epitome of success, but they are hiding secrets that only the game of the Escape Room will reveal. They each get to have their voice, but I honestly didn't find any of the characters in the elevator really likable at all. Even when we hear a little bit about their pasts or what made these characters into the people they are now, I still didn't feel connected to them. They were not characters who I could get behind.

When the game becomes a life and death sort of situation, we get to see the mystery of the Stanhope team unfold. The past and present collide, bringing a conclusion that seemed fitting for these flawed characters.
Secrets, Lies, backstabbing, murder and games. This mystery/suspense/thriller brought a very unique and entertaining voice to this genre. I would definitely recommend this book and will be looking forward to reading more by this author.

The cut-throat world of high finance can having you living either a dream or a nightmare! Sara Hall thought she was the luckiest person in the world when she “accidentally “ landed a job in one of the most prestigious high-finance companies in the country. But the life quickly lost its glow in the expectation,of giving up your personal life for that of the company. Were the benefits and the money really worth all that? Her team...Vincent, Jules, Sam, Sylvia and Lucy.....No one wanted to be friends...it was all about the money and the competition. Except for Lucy...who wanted to be friends but insisted that it be kept a secret. And then Lucy is found dead......and there is much more to it than it seems. Sara soon finds out how dangerous it is to ask too many questions., as her life comes crashing down around her.. its then that she discovers the clues that Lucy has left behind, and the idea of revenge takes a firm grip on her. The story bounces from the team to their personal stories ...with just enough detail to let you know they all have their issues. More time is spent on Sara as she is really who the story revolves around. Her plan of revenge brings in a current activity that many take part in...the escape room...but hers has decidedly higher stakes and consequences. Sara remembers what her mom has told her: the best revenge is to live well. With this in mind she carries out her plan. I enjoyed the book very much and can definitely recommend it. I received an ARC of this book from the author, the publisher and NetGalley for an honest opinion, which this has been. #NetGalley, #TheEscapeRoom

I was intrigued by the concept of this book reading like a literary escape room, and honestly, that part fell a little short. Overall, this was a great book that was full of mystery and suspense

Four Wall Street rising financiers are locked in an escape room with the goal of getting out alive. This is a team building exercise. They are trapped in the dark and have to reveal their darkest secrets and one of them may have to kill to get out.

At the Wall Street firm Stanhope & Sons, employees are expected to be completely committed, working 100 hour weeks, missing family events, and forgoing any semblance of a life outside their job. Their orientation indoctrinates them into the ideology of the firm: make money. In return, they are handsomely rewarded with astronomical salaries and bonuses.

Still, the downturn has touched the firm, Vincent’s team in particular, and they’ve lost several key accounts in the past six months. He, Jules, Sam, and Sylvie fear that they may be soon terminated. So, when they receive an invitation to participate in a mandatory “escape room” activity on a Friday evening, they all arrive at the strange skyscraper that is still under construction even though none want to be there, just in case their performance might save their jobs.

Reluctantly, they filed into the elevator to rendezvous at the specified floor. Not too far into the journey, the elevator car stalled, the lights were cut, the heat blasted, and emergency services silenced.

Only Sam has ever participated in an escape room before--he and his buddies went to a warehouse for a bachelor party and after an introduction were put in a simulated Learjet with the goal to find a bomb. Although they found clues in the cabin, the “bomb” exploded, and an hour later, they were released by the staff. Right away, he realized something was different. No escape room staff had provided an introduction or given them an objective. And where in an elevator could clues be hidden?

Though the quartet had worked together for years, spending more time together than they did with their loved ones, they still harbored secrets. Yet, to escape the confines of their captivity, they needed to work together, something that the cutthroat Stanhope & Sons didn’t prepare them to do. They had all expected to emerge, perhaps with a career advantage, but as time passed, they wondered if they would leave the escape room at all as long-simmering resentments and buried secrets boiled to the surface.

The Escape Room has two points of view that alternate throughout the book: a third-person narrator relating the events in the elevator and an employee from the firm recounting the history of the team inside. While I don’t know how accurate Goldin’s depiction of a Wall Street firm’s culture is, if they are anything like Stanhope & Sons, they are even worse than I imagined: cynical, sexist, and opportunistic. How the different women handle the male-dominated working environment is an interesting aspect of the book.
While the suspense in the elevator begins immediately, the action taking place from the other point of view is a slow burn, at times too slow for my taste, and I didn’t always like moving from the psychological chess game and sometimes literal danger in the elevator to the more mundane activities represented by the employee narrator. However, at the end of the book, the activity picks ups in a surprising way, and though it strains credulity, it is also quite satisfying.

If you are looking for a psychological thriller that introduces some new tropes, The Escape Room is a fair bet. Set against the already high-stakes world of high finance and confining a group of less than moral people in a small space, the book takes a new approach. Definitely an entertaining read.

This novel is divided between the present--where a number of corporate executive types are trapped in an escape room--and a first person account from the past of someone who had worked at the same company. I wanted to read the book because I love escape rooms and thought that the story would weave the escape room element into the novel, but just to warn readers, there's very little escape room. It's more like "trapped in a room" while the characters have to figure out who is doing this to them and why. (Even the antagonist admits at some point that the escape room element was an afterthought.) So.. I felt like there was a mismatch between the title and what the book was actually about. I thought that each clue would unlock a further piece to the mystery and that there would be a lot of clues that the reader could get in on, which isn't really what this book is, just so you know. If you're in the mood for a sort of corporate thriller of the "airplane book" variety, this might fall into that category.

The synopsis details the plot and characters adequately, so I won't. Just when you think every book will follow a similar, over-used formula, a gem like this comes along. This was easily a 5 star book for me until the last 5%. As the author revealed all that needed to be revealed it was unveiled in such a way that really poisoned the book for me. I was riding a non-stop ride that crashed to a halt by unrealistic events and scenarios. Granted, a lot of the book required suspension of disbelief but not in such an obvious, Alice -must -be -in -Wonderland way. I will still recommend it highly based on my general interest and concern for the characters as well as the unique storyline. I could easily cast this with my favorite 80's actors in their stereotypical roles. Fun book!!

For those who are claustrophobic, the setting of The Escape Room won’t be too hard to imagine. While the story flashes from present to past, it opens with a prologue regarding Miguel, a security guard who works the night shift at a construction site. The site is a luxury office tower in the final stages of construction.

When Miguel thinks he hears a muffled scream, he tries to talk himself into believing that he just has an active imagination. But when he discovers an elevator switch flickering in the dark, he’s not so sure about the fear coming from his imagination. Why would someone be using the elevator? He should be the only one in the building. But when unmistakable gunshots cause him to hit the ground, he begins frantically punching 911 into his phone.

Thirty-four Hours Earlier

High finance colleagues, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie, and Sam, get notifications from their employer of a compulsory meeting on a Friday evening. (The meeting is at the desolate building mentioned in the prologue.)

As they arrive that evening they all crowd into the elevator, wondering what the meeting could be about. But their guessing doesn’t last long. As they begin to ascend, the lights suddenly go out, the elevator abruptly stops, and doors stay shut.

Though some are more concerned than others, the group reason that the meeting is a team-building activity. They are to work together to solve the puzzle of getting the elevator to run again. And team-building efforts such as this aren’t unheard of at their company. So they try to remain calm and start to search for clues.

Though they do find a few cryptic clues, a sobering thought begins to occur to all of them: there will be no activity, including security watchmen at the building until the following Monday.

But is this really what they think it is, or a dangerous game of survival? Will these colleagues who are trapped in the dark, each one with facades, begin to open up to each other? Will the struggle to deal with minimal ventilation, claustrophobia, their own thoughts, and fear make them better or worse people? Is this game a game of survival?

Flash Back to Sara Hall and Her Story

Sara Hall is surprised when she is noticed and asked to interview at the prestigious Stanhope and Sons. And if that isn’t surprising and exciting enough, she is quickly hired by the big company. And it couldn’t come at a better time since she has medical bills to deal with.

Soon Sara realizes that Stanhope and Sons expect extremely long hours and have zero tolerance for errors. It’s highly stressful. And means constantly being on guard to protect position and employment. Not exactly what Sara bargained for, but the pay is extremely appealing.

So how does Sara fit into this story? And Lucy Marshall, a genius who is also assigned to work with the people who are in the elevator? Trust me, it will all make sense when you get a copy of this book in July. So mark your calendar!


Thanks to NetGalley via St. Martin’s Press for giving me an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

My Thoughts


What Concerned Me: To be honest, the believability factor is pretty low. (Continued below)

What I Liked Most: But the excitement level is high. They work together to create a great book for mystery and thriller lovers. It kept me flipping pages at a pretty fast pace and I had no trouble hurrying back to this book.

While the beginning was a bit overwhelming with so many names, it didn’t take me long to start getting things sorted out. If you don’t worry too much about names at the first of the book, you shouldn’t have a problem at all.

The story was described in such a manner that I could easily picture the elevator and the people inside. Then as it flashed to the past, the story all slowly tied together.

Three stars - I liked it!

Believable, no, but fast-paced entertainment that kept me hooked? Yes. Absolutely.

The story is told in alternating viewpoints (along two different timelines) between Sara Hall and a group of four colleagues participating in an escape room.

Sara has landed the opportunity of a lifetime at Stanhope and Sons, a prestigious firm that boasts 10,000 applicants a month, dozens of branches around the country, and securing deals in the billions. She got to rage quit her dead end job and that was a mood right there. She will have enough money to cover her ailing parents’ health expenses and then some. Of course it comes at a price. The firm does an excellent job of throwing off your moral compass, putting dollars above people, working you long hours, and expecting you to do it all while looking like a model. Except Lucy, who with an IQ of 151 and the ability to predict financial situations no one saw coming, has a pass to be plain and socially inept in the corner. Sara befriends her, but Lucy insists they keep their friendship a secret from their colleagues.

In every other chapter, we are updated on the progress of an escape room, held in an actual elevator. There, Vincent, Sylvie, Sam, and Jules were told via e-mails from HR that participation was required and avoiding a layoff meant doing well in this team building test. They begrudgingly show up, possibly sacrificing their marriages and their vacation plans - but what else is new? Stanhope calls, they answer. But as the time ticks away with no solutions to the room in sight, the four start turning against each other. Emotions run high and the shocking confessions just pour out of them. My jaw hit the floor.

How do these two storylines tie together? Well, that’s the part that’s worth suspending belief for, I promise. This book has murder, revenge, greed, corruption, backstabbing, secrecy ... pretty much everything anyone could ever ask for. I definitely recommend it.

Trigger warnings for suicide and sexual assault.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing a digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

3.5 stars rounded up for this fast-paced, thrilling read!

The story alternates chapters between the four Wall Street investment bankers stuck in the elevator and Sara, their former colleague, whose story shows the corruption and greed running rampant in the business. I definitely enjoyed Sara's chapters better as she was one of the few redeeming characters. The other four were such horrible people that I really didn't care at all what happened to them beyond getting what they deserved for their deplorable behavior!

My only issues were that some of the storyline stretched the limits of believability and there were a few loose ends that I would have liked to see tied up. But overall, The Escape Room was an exciting story that I couldn't stop reading and I will definitely check out Megan Goldin's next book.