Review: No Exit by Taylor Adams

Title: No Exit

Author: Taylor Adams

Published: January 2019, William Morrow

Format: Hardcover, 352 pages

Source: Publisher

Summary: 

A brilliant, edgy thriller about four strangers, a blizzard, a kidnapped child, and a determined young woman desperate to unmask and outwit a vicious psychopath.

A kidnapped little girl locked in a stranger’s van. No help for miles. What would you do?

On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside, are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers.

Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm . . . and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate.

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

There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one?

Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape.

But who can she trust?

With exquisitely controlled pacing, Taylor Adams diabolically ratchets up the tension with every page. Full of terrifying twists and hairpin turns,No Exit will have you on the edge of your seat and leave you breathless.

My thoughts: This is one of those books that is getting all the hype this winter and I have to say I was a bit worried about picking it up. Sometimes those books don’t always live up to their expectations. On top of that, I had decided to read it the weekend we were expecting two storms…I figured it was the perfect time to dig into this book. Well, luckily for the book, it totally lived up to the hype and more, which is a lot more than I can say for the snow storms that we were supposed to be getting that weekend, which ended up fizzling out for us.

I absolutely devoured this book. I sat down to read it in the afternoon and just couldn’t put it down. I was completely addicted to this book and even stayed up late to finish reading it – and I cannot even tell you the last time I did that! This book just gets your adrenaline pumping and you cannot think about anything else but what is going to happen next. 

I loved that the characters in this book are so untrustworthy. Darby is stuck in a rest stop in the middle of a snow storm with complete strangers and can not figure out who she is able to trust. Even as the reader, you are not sure who is trustworthy and I loved that. On top of that, this book gets a bit violent – it’s definitely not a calm thriller at all. This one is head-on, hide-your-eyes type of violent in some parts, yet it’s the type of book that you just have to keep reading to see how it all ends up. Is there going to be some type of happy ending or not? I really did not know.

If you like intense, binge-worthy, thrilling reads, I highly recommend this one. This is one of those books that totally lives up to the hype and more. It’s fast-paced and will have you thinking of nothing else once you start reading it.