Book Review: NO EXIT by Taylor Adams

Title: No Exit

Author: Taylor Adams
Publisher: Joffe Books
Read: June 2017

Expected publication: 1 July 2017

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟

Book Description (Goodreads):

Darby Thorne is a college student stranded by a blizzard at a highway rest stop in the middle of nowhere. She’s on the way home to see her sick mother. She’ll have to spend the night in the rest stop with four complete strangers. Then she stumbles across a little girl locked inside one of their parked cars.

There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, no way out because of the snow, and she doesn’t know which one of the other travelers is the kidnapper.

Who is the little girl? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her?

My musings:

After a very intense and emotional last read, I wanted an entertaining, fast-paced thriller to clean my palate and save me from my book hangover – and No Exit sounded like just that type of book. The premise of a small group of people confined in a small space in the middle of a snowstorm intrigued me. I love tense, claustrophobic settings as a backdrop to a crime story. Adams sets the scene very well, with young Darby getting caught in a blizzard as she is driving her old car across the country to get to the bedside of her dying mother. Darby’s anxiety of not making it in time is portrayed really well, as is her desperation as she realises that she is trapped in a remote location with no means of escape, and no phone service to alert her family or the authorities to her plight. Just the thought of being confined to a bleak roadside shelter with four strangers sent shivers down my spine. The situation gets even worse when Darby discovers a little girl imprisoned in one of the cars parked outside, and realises that some of the people inside the shelter may be involved in a kidnapping. The premise of the story had all the right elements for a heart-pounding thriller, and there is certainly a lot of adrenaline-surging action as the story plays out.

I enjoyed this for the quick and entertaining read I had wished for, but had a few minor issues with general plotting. <spoiler> For example, why would the two brother pretend that they didn’t know one another? There was no motive to do so. At this stage, Darby had not even discovered the little girl in the van. It didn’t make any sense. </spoiler> My main gripe however was the character of the six-year-old girl, who talked and acted like an adult. Even though my own children are no longer that young, I see little children every day at work, and have never come across one as precocious as young Jay. The story would have worked much better for me had Jay acted like the little child she was supposed to be – for one, it would have got all my maternal instincts going whilst reading it, and let me form a much deeper emotional connection to the child. 

Summary:

No Exit was a quick and entertaining read with a tense and claustrophobic setting and lots of action in the later half of the story. Readers who can overlook a few minor plot-holes may find it the perfect holiday read for the train or the plane or just to clean the palate with a book that carries you along in its wake without needing to puzzle out any riddles along the way. I thought it would make a great movie!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.