The Escape Room by Megan Goldin

Publisher's Synopsis

Welcome to the escape room. Your goal is simple. Get out alive.

In the lucrative world of finance, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie, and Sam are at the top of their game. They’ve mastered the art of the deal and celebrate their success in style—but a life of extreme luxury always comes at a cost.

Invited to participate in an escape room challenge as a team-building exercise, the ferociously competitive co-workers crowd into the elevator of a high-rise building, eager to prove themselves. But when the lights go off and the doors stay shut, it quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary competition: they’re caught in a dangerous game of survival.

Trapped in the dark, the colleagues must put aside their bitter rivalries and work together to solve cryptic clues to break free. But as the game begins to reveal the team’s darkest secrets, they realize there’s a price to be paid for the terrible deeds they committed in their ruthless climb up the corporate ladder. As tempers fray, and the clues turn deadly, they must solve one final chilling puzzle: which one of them will kill in order to survive?

My Review 

You know those team building exercises management used to send us on that everyone hated? Well what if it was an escape room challenge starting on a Friday evening. And what if, once it started, it never ended. This is the predicament facing four colleagues in Megan Goldin’s The Escape Room.

The four finance professionals, big-time firm, huge dollar business deals behind them, company cutbacks in the offing, all meet in the foyer of the building they had been directed to attend. They’re not happy but aren’t game to blow it off. They get in the elevator, the doors close, it rises 70 floors, the elevator stops, the lights go out and they are stuck. Their escape room encounter has begun.

The story unfolds, told in alternating chapters from a couple of viewpoints. The first is a 3rd person narrative from inside the elevator tracking the progress (or lack thereof) of Vincent, Sam, Jules and Sylvie. The second is a first person account from Sara Hall.

Sara Hall manages to snag a job at Stanhope and Sons, one of the leading financial firms in the country. It’s a lucrative position, but she quickly realises it means long hours and the firm demands complete dedication to the business. She works in a small team, Vincent, Sam, Jules, Sylvie and Lucy, putting together deal proposals worth millions for their clients.

It’s a highly volatile job where competition within the team is fierce, sexism is rife and people’s lives can be destroyed by the swipe of a pen. The account we’re given makes it clear where Sara sits in the pecking order.

As the story progresses we switch from the elevator to Sara and back again picking up more intel about the characters, mainly through back story narrative. And, quite frankly, the more we find out about the four in the elevator, the more you understand just what low-lifes they are.

There definitely has to be a certain level of suspension of disbelief involved here in order to enjoy this for the action drama that it aims to be. I felt there was a massive change in character personality at play for the majority of meaningful events to take place. (I’m being purposely vague here to ensure I don’t give away any of the plot).

From quite a long and, at times, plodding build up, things start to take shape to provide a whirlwind finish. Through all of this we get a taste of the winner-take-all attitude of high finance professionals where every slightest professional edge is highly prized and nothing stands in the way of reaching it. But at what cost?

Plot twists were thrown in at regular intervals. Some missed the mark but enough of them hit with enough force to completely catch me off guard.

Ultimately, I found that I enjoyed the concept of the escape room, shuddered at the workplace scenes and was completely engrossed in the way things were wrapped up. Megan Goldin has done a fine job of drawing her parallel lines together with a sure hand and has put together a solid thriller set in the world of high finance.