Not gonna lie, when I first saw this cover and read about it, I was so hoping that I would be able to get this book to read early. And wow I’m just so shocked that I got on this blog tour! Thank you so much to FFBC for having this blog tour and for having me on it! Click on the banner for the rest of the schedule – shout out to my fellow hosts for being on this with me! – and to see some of the other blog tours coming down the pipeline.

This thrilling debut, reminiscent of new fan favorites like One of Us Is Lying and the beloved classics by Agatha Christie, will leave readers guessing until the explosive ending.

Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting.

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die?

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I’m Diana Urban, and I write dark, twisty thrillers for teens including All Your Twisted Secrets (HarperTeen, March 17th 2020). When I’m not torturing fictional characters, I’m a marketing manager at BookBub, a leading book discovery platform. Outside the bookish world, I live with my husband and cat in Boston, and enjoy reading, video games, fawning over cute animals, and looking at the beach from a safe distance.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Fantastic Flying Book Club, Edelweiss, and HarperTeen for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

I personally have never read a locked-room mystery novel if I remember correctly – I’m not including Evelyn Hardcastle as a locked-room mystery although that one was pretty close – and wow this one just blew me away. Sure, I could say that I was pretty tempted with the whole Breakfast Club comparison, although that was never my favorite movie or anything. I just like the idea of kids seemingly worlds apart finding out that they aren’t so different from one another. It was interesting.

BUT THIS.

Wow if I had to talk about a book that had me on the edge of my seat, this was one of them.

There’s also the whole moral dilemma thing of how can you choose someone to die in your place? Like, I may be cruel, but I don’tknow if I could be that cruel, ya feel? It reminds me of that part in The Dark Knight where the Joker has the two boats make the decision on whether they would blow up the other boat or have them all die. Remember which group was willing to blow up the others more? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the prisoners.

Again, this is one of those books that make you think about just how intense choices like this can be, and it also makes you think about what you would do if you were in their shoes. It gets intense, fam. I think I said that already but I’m not even joking. This was INTENSE.

Not gonna lie, when I first saw the cover for this book, I was envisioning a full cast of either Latinx or American Indian actors and that’s what I’m going to stick with. May see ma little out there, and sure it may not be accurate, but that’s just really what I have in mind for the whole book.