This Is Not a Drill (review)

Seniors Emery and Jake spend several French classes each week teaching rudimentary vocabulary to first graders. They enjoy working with the children, but it's not always easy to keep focused on the lessons while ignoring their former romance that ended in an abrupt breakup. Today they have a much bigger problem: a pistol-toting father, Mr. Stutts, evades the school's lax security and bursts into the classroom to collect his son, Patrick, whom he is about to lose in a custody battle. The teacher soon crashes into a diabetic coma, so it is up to Emery and Jake to protect their eighteen charges while slyly feeding information to the SWAT team assembled outside the building. Emery and Jake contribute alternating views of the action, a technique that would have been far more effective if the pair did not so frequently pause to discuss their own backstory in the midst of the hostage crisis. Stutts, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD, is treated as a complex, sympathetic villain: "I know he's a monster—I'm terrified of what he might do. But he's also a wounded soldier, and I can't forget that." McDowell promptly tips readers off to three impending deaths, but each death is more a matter of sadness and inevitability than outright horror. Plenty of skeptics will wonder why Stutts didn't just exit through a back door or window when he had the chance, but thriller fans willing to suspend disbelief will simply roll with the unfolding drama.