I received a review copy from the publishers in exchange for an honest review. It has not affected my opinions.
Genre: Thriller Age Range: YA Star Rating: 4 stars Series: standalone
Blurb:
When Saffron is forced to do work experience at a tech company, she gets into an argument with her supervisor over which high school stereotype would survive the longest in a horror film: the sports star? The queen bee? The swot? The drama girl? The class clown? The rebel?
Unbeknown to them, the AI robot she is working on at the time decides to determine the answer by testing it out for real. It designs an algorithm to search social media and school records to find the best examples of each stereotype from the neighbouring towns, and the invitations go out – six people, including Saffron’s perfectionist sister Georgia, will be trapped in a series of deadly escape rooms and only one will survive the night…
Blurb taken from Goodreads. Add to your shelves here.
Review:
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER is a locked room (bunker) thriller about eight people trapped in an escape room complex, forced to play by an AI, while the death toll mounts.
It is really brutal at times – the manners of death/injury are gruesome at times. Plus there are some very creepy set pieces (the robot bunnies!) It definitely feels a step darker than TAG, YOU’RE DEAD, which I enjoyed. It heightens the tension with each horrible event because you start to realise how few holds are barred in this book, and just how much danger the characters in.
It is a dual POV book, told from Georgia and Saffron’s perspective. It’s really Georgia’s book, though. She has the bulk of the narration (probably 3/4 of it) as she’s the one playing the game and being exposed to the secrets and killer/s in the gamer group. Saffron, meanwhile, is trapped in the control room, showing the reader just how out of control the AI is.
The AI is a very chilling villain. It’s all pure logic and no emotion to reason with or even understand; it wants data, and making the characters fight one another gets it that data. It controls the systems and can’t be attacked directly, to be tied up and got out of the way.
The AI is paired very nicely with a human villain – someone in the group is killing the players off. But none of them can agree what to do and all have secrets they’d kill one another for. It adds another, more immediate layer of danger, a bloody, touchable, unpredictable one to balance the cold, all-controlling AI villain.
There are also multi-media elements between the chapters – video transcripts, group chats, text exchanges. I really love it when books include these, and here they add to the mystery as you’re not told who the texts are between. It’s a fun way of teasing out people’s secrets…
Read my reviews of other books by Kathryn Foxfield:
Young Adult:
Standalones:
Middle Grade:
Standalones:
Sifa Elizabeth Reads 