No Exit by Taylor Adams | Book Review

★★★★☆
June 27th

No Exit is a thriller. I don’t know why, but for some reason I was under the impression that this book was a mystery. Maybe it was the premise? Darby Thorne is a college student who’s driving to see her sick mother through a really bad snowstorm in Colorado. On her trip, she gets snowed into a rest stop with a few other strangers. One of these strangers has a child in the back of their van, locked in a cage.

I thought that most of this book was going to be trying to solve who had the child in the backseat, but I was totally wrong. This book was way more about the repercussions of Darby’s discovery, and what she does with this information.

The whole time that I was reading it, I had the feeling that this book was written for the screen. Less of a novel, and more of a screenplay. Even without a lot of long descriptions, I found the book very visual, and could clearly picture what was happening and each location. Reading into Taylor Adams a little bit, his film background makes that even more apparent, and makes the book make a bit more sense.

I felt on the edge of my seat the entire way through this book. I loved the pacing, and the book did a great job by continuing to thrill me and push me through. About 50-75 pages in, when I realized that this was decidedly not a mystery, I wondered if the author was going to be able to continue the thrilling momentum though the book. In my opinion, they totally did.

My biggest complaint about this book was the dual perspectives. I found it uncomfortable to go between Darby and Ashley, sometimes just for a few paragraphs, although I understood the necessary context that it provided, especially towards the end of the book. I think that it could have been introduced in a slightly less jarring way.

Overall, this was a great read. I’m definitely going to go back and check out some of Taylor Adam’s previous novels, as well as any thrillers he comes out with in the future.

-Siobhan