I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I thought this would be a fast paced thriller. It started out on the intense side, but then fell off the tracks. The setting is the very competitive world of finance. The employees think they are about to do a team building exercise in the form of an escape room. It turned into murder and twists. I had to know the end, but it felt like it took me forever to get there.

The Escape Room by Megan Goldin is the "wow" thriller of the year for me! What a story. A group of fast living rich business folk become trapped in an elevator with one another. They soon discover that this is an escape room game, but there are serious results about.

As the story moves along we learn about the main character, a young college graduate who joins an exclusive firm and what she faces as she tries to climb the corporate ladder. Eventually with nepharious poweder plays leading to a couple of deaths, the woman also finds herself out side of the system.

Now the players are trapped in the elevator. What is happening to them? Who is controlling this? All of these questions and more are told in a well crafted thriller. I cannot wait for this author to compose more novels. Not since John's Grisham's The Firm as a book grabbed me as completely and satisfyingly as this one did!

What a phenomenal book! Early on we learn of the death of several characters, and we anxiously await to see how it all plays out. I really enjoyed the alternating timelines, and the suspense build as to when they would converge. The ultimate story of revenge, 5 stars to The Escape Room!

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for this ARC!

Compelling glimpse into the cutthroat world of high finance. It's Lifeboat, in an elevator. Well drawn characters and an ending worthy of the movies.

The title caught my eye, who doesn't love escape rooms?! Then the description hooked me and I had to start reading. Was unsure how an elevator escape room could span an entire book, so glad to have the backstory to keep things interesting. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book, I will definitely recommend to friends and continue on with other books by Megan Goldin.

High finance has never been more dangerous. Four colleagues are summoned to a building under construction for what they think is a corporate team building exercise that becomes a deadly game of escape the elevator. The intensity builds quickly as they become mad then frantic to solve the clues. The other part of the book also deals with the early days of the team and those who are no longer part of this corporation's rat nest. Each one has secrets, each has been pushed to their limits but they must work as a team to survive. Thriller junkies will love this but you may want to take the stairs for a while. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

The Escape Room is a compelling tale set in the cutthroat world of investment banking. We follow two threads, one telling Sara Hall’s story of recruitment and employment on Wall Street and the group she works with; the other is set in the present day as her group finds themselves trapped in an elevator in the building to which they’d been summoned for an escape room team activity. Without giving much away, suffice it to say that this book is a total page turner as the characters are revealed and the plot develops.

A compulsive page turner, I can’t recommend this enough!

I was hooked from beginning to end. Even with a simple plot that’s predictable, there’s genius in the storytelling.

Hello happy readers, I have never read a book by this author before and was very happy with this book. It captured my attention and I really enjoyed reading it. I am a very engaged reader and love to read new books by new authors and this story line was enjoyable!! Hope you enjoy as well.

A first purchase for adult collections where thrillers are popular. Also has crossover appeal for HS collections for older teens who enjoy escape rooms, locked-room mysteries, and thrillers.

I read about 5% of this and then set it aside. The writing style was amateurish and cliched, which distracted from the plot, so I wasn't interested in finishing it.

An incredibly unique plot and true psychological thriller. As these 4 coworkers are stuck in an elevator, they learn they are actually in an escape room challenge, but orchestrated by who? One of the ones stuck with them in the elevator or someone else entirely? We learn the backgrounds, motivations, and sins of the past for these 4 co-workers as they are "messed with" during their challenge. I could feel the tensions, despair, and panic of the group as they dissect their last several years together in the office to try and figure out who's game this is. We also get a great look into the backstory of 2 former coworkers, Sarah and Lucy, who try to fit into the corporate greed and lifestyle demands of working in the industry, but are no longer working with the 4 in the elevator. Great twists and turns with a satisfying ending. A fast paced read that is hard to put down.

Stick four unlikable, greed driven people in a small confined area, turn off the lights and watch what happens. The psychological pressure and personal inner demons turned out to be as challenging as trying to figure out the puzzle of how to get out of the “escape” room. I enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t led to root for one character over another. It was like a guilty pleasure to just watch the train wreck coming. Complete escape for the reader. Highly recommend!

I really enjoyed this book! It was nothing like what I expected, and that was a good thing. It was fun to see despicable characters get their comeuppance in such a deliciously evil way (I know --' that sounds terrible)! A great beach read for the summer!

So good, Gone Girl good.

I loved this psychological thriller. I was a little skeptical as to how the author could make a real escape room believable. Wendy did an excellent job of supporting the escape room as a real-life game. The puzzles and clues are fun to try to solve on your own. The writing style had a cliff hanger at the end of each chapter making it hard to put down.

All of the characters were well developed and likable. All around well written and engaging book.

I enjoyed her books, Emma in the Night and The Night Before. I plan to read Four Wives and All is Forgotten next.

I received this galley from NetGalley.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC.

It took me a long time to get into this book. I don’t know if it was the story or the writing style, but I found something lacking in this book. It was dragging and slow paced.

Dear Megan Goldin, today I was a terrible mother to my children and I blame you. I should have played with them a bit more, but instead I was solely focused on finishing "The Escape Room" and was not to be bothered.

I didn't really know what I was getting into with this one. The plan was to read for ten minutes before going to bed... it was a bad idea. An hour later, I was mad at myself for not staying up later to read. "The Escape Room" is fast-paced and fun. There are some hard-to-believe moments as everything came together, but as a reader, I was okay with that because the pacing and story-telling was great.

In the very beginning of the book, you are thrown into a dire situation: A security guard is working a night shift in a large building that is not yet open to the public. He hears a scream, a gunshot, and the elevator.
Without giving too much away, the elevator becomes the scene of the escape room--4 elite co-workers are stuck in an elevator. They thought they were being put in an escape room situation as a team building exercise, and when that goes wrong they attempt to understand who put them there, why they are there, and how to get out. I'm too much of a coward to play at actual escape room mysteries, but it was a lot of fun reading about one!

Thank you to St, Martin's Press and Netgalley for an ARC copy of "The Escape Room" in exchange for an honest review. Definitely a 5-star, exciting thriller that I'll be recommending to friends!

This was a great book,, hard to figure out at first seemed 2 be different stories not connecting.

A security guard hears a scream and gunshots in the pre dawn hours of an office building under construction.

Vincent, Sylvie, Sam and Jules are an investment firm team. Vincent is the head of the team and he tells them they have to do an escape room challenge. The all enter the elevator presumably to go to a top floor in the building. The elevator turns out to be the escape room.

Sara Hall meets Vincent in an elevator after a dismal job interview he tells her his firm is hiring and arranges for her to come to New York for an interview. She gets a job as part of the investment team .

Jules brings a gun to the meeting (he claims its for protection after getting mugged) While in the elevator they have to solve various clues with coded messages with quotes/remarks/comments of each other from their annual reviews. This pits them against each other. They discover an envelope in Vincent's briefcase which discloses the amounts of their bonuses and provides a code for them to use to open the elevator. Nothing happens though. They all become incensed and a physical altercation ensues in which Vincent suffers a concussion and Sam is seriously injured.

Sara becomes friends with Lucy the financial whiz of the investment team but upon Lucy's advice they keep their friendship a secret from their co workers.
Lucy commits suicide but Sara doesn't believe she took her life since she was against suicide.. Lucy left a suicide note but her mother (Cathy) says it doesn't seem like Lucy and doesn't believe she wrote it willingly.

When Sara goes to help Cathy pack up Lucy's apartment Cathy tells her the kitchen was a mess with dirty dishes and cupboards left open and her closet was a mess, which wasn't like Lucy at all: she was always organized and kept everything neat.

Cathy calls Sara and tells her the boxes from Lucy's apartment arrived but not the box with Lucy's laptop..
Sara observes that Cathy is very security conscious-double locks on her apartment door and Sara gets the feeling she is being followed when she leaves the apartment and when she boards the train and realizes later that the man she saw on the train was the same man she had seen at the office once talking to Vincent..

Cathy told Sara she though Lucy's death had something to do with the investment firm.

Six months later Sara learns from Cathy's sister that Cathy never moved in with her,, she was killed by a hit and run driver. Sara goes online to look at the news reports of the accident and learns that a cab driver witnessed the accident and claimed the car deliberately ran Cathy down and the description of the driver matches the man Sara saw. following her.

Sara goes through a box of Lucy's belongings what Cathy gave her and discovers Lucy had an altercation at work,, she called out an executive over a deal that was going to lose $8 million when in actuality it was $11 million. He confronts her after the meeting and gropes her. Lucy 8i8s also drugged and raped in the elevator late one night when working alone..
When Sara informs Vincent of this he warns her not to make false accusations if she values her job. She gets excluded form meetings and is unable to view documents she had been before, her computer is tampered with, she is expected to make increasingly short deadlines and her work is corrupted with incorrect information.
She is fired and made to sign a non disclosure agreement and not given a reference for future employment..

Sam tells Vincent about the arranged attack on Lucy and Sylvie tells him that Jules was in the elevator to keep things form getting out of hand and the rapists were purposely provided with enough alcohol to get them drunk She tells Vincent that she put a roofie in Lucy's water bottle.

Meanwhile Sara is unable to get a job since she has no reference. She starts to think about getting revenge,
She finds in a record cover that Lucy left her that Lucy knew the team was guilty of insider trading of which Lucy was helping them increase their "take". She provides details and codes for the shell company set up to handle the money. With Lucy's death the company starts to lose a lot of money.

Jules realizes that if only one of the team survives that person will have al of the money and not have to share it.

Sara arranges to make it seem like she dies in a car accident and sets up a memorial page on Facebook. She then gets a new identity and changes her appearance. She gets a job at an elevator company and goes out into the field learning what she can about elevators from the installers a nd service technicians.: learning aobut elevator design electronics and installation. She takes courses on programming an coding and develops a code for a program which allows her to hack into an elevator system.

She then takes a job at the investment firm working in a back office and getting access to all of the team's emails a nd internet browsers and is able to find out about t heir business deals and leak information about them to their competitors thereby costing her former co workers a lot of money from failed deals.

After Lucy's attack she had urged the others to come clean about the insider trading (the shell company they had set up_. Sam goes to her apartment after she tells him she's going to the SEC and the feds and telling them all she knows. He slips a roofie in her drink, and forces her to write a suicide note which he dictates, he tells her to take a warm bath figuring she'll fall asleep and drown. However this doesn't happen so he places her laptop in her hands figuring she'll drop in the tub water at some point and electrocute herself. He makes a mess in her apartment to make it appear she was losing her mind.

When Cathy called the office about her suspicions and information she found Sam arranges to have her killed before she can inform the police about what she knows. and he arranges to have her apartment broken into in order to find the incriminating papers,

Sara is able to sneak into the office building and rigging the elevator. She ensures all of the team members will be there by sending them information about a mandatory fake meeting. The escape room is just a ruse to keep them together and inaccessible for the weekend.. She disables the wi fi capability in the elevator so they can't inform anyone of their predicament and get help. She figures they'll be ok until Monday morning.

Jules aims the gun at Vincent but it is wrestled away. Sylvie takes it and shoots Jules and the other bullet ricochets and hits Sylvie and Vincent. When the elevator opens on Monday morning Sam is holding the gun and the police shoot him. Vincent is the only one who survives..

Sara goes to the Cayman Islands bank to empty the safe deposit box and close out the bank account which she has previously emptied. She looks like Sylvie so no questions are asked. She empties the safety deposit box of gold bullion and treasury notes. She transfers the money electronically to other accounts in different banks in different countries. She boards a cruise ship after donning yet another disguise and then gets off at Saint John where she lives. She lives well as her mother once taught her is the best revenge.

We don't know if she ever finds out the news about the elevator tragedy and what happens to Vincent.

My kind of book! A thriller I couldn*t put aside for long with a unique story I was eager to finish. Wall Street staff assuming "The Escape Room" but soon enough realizing foul play in an elevator. A book I highly recommend reading.

Thank you NetGalley and the author for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

4 unexpected stars for this wildly entertaining, compelling, claustrophobic, and massively unrealistic page turner! I hadn’t heard much about this book, so I didn’t really have any expectations going in, and isn’t it just the most wonderful thing when a book like that totally grips you and has you racing through it? From the beginning, it was pretty clear what was going on, but it was so fun unfolding the reasons why. This book was a little nutty, wholly unrelatable, and the corruption and arrogance and enormous egos of the main characters hit a little close to home considering the current goings on in the real world, but I devoured it in all of its murky, corrupt, and claustrophobic goodness. I think it’s safe to say I’ll be taking the stairs for the forseeable future.

Thank you, NetGalley for the free copy in exchange for review!