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. Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm and makes a horrifying discovery: a little girl is locked in an animal crate.
Thrilling ... There’s a cinematic propulsion to No Exit that commands the reader’s attention, and Mr. Adams times his shocks with a sure hand. Narrative shifts reveal other characters’ histories, but Darby remains the principal player as she seeks an impossible-seeming resolution.
Author Taylor Adams brings left field surprises one after the other at a speed that will force you to stop reading every once in a while so you can catch the breath you're holding and remind yourself it's only fiction ... No Exit is A KNOCKOUT! Readers will press their hands to the sides of their face and wince in alarm! Roadtrippers will never again stop at a highway rest area without thinking of this wowza of a book.
Read if you like the carefully layered drawing-room psychology of Agatha Christie, cross-pollinated with the pure, squishy terror of Stephen King ... Adams nails his setup and builds some truly distinctive characters, though the piled-on revelations of Exit‘s last third can’t help but loosen the grip of its early trapped-animal intensity.
