All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban (review)

Seventeen-year-old music geek Amber Prescott and an assortment of fellow seniors, including her boyfriend, her best friends, her secret crush, and one outsider, think they’ve been invited to a special scholarship awards dinner. Their excitement quickly turns to terror, though, when they instead find themselves trapped in a locked room with nothing but a bomb, a syringe full of poison, and one terrible message as a clue: one of them must die, or all of them will die. Now Amber and the others must plumb their shared pasts in a desperate attempt to figure out what they did that brought them here and what they can do to get out alive. Shifting rapidly between the ticking-clock present and scenes from the previous year, this debut novel is a tense page-turner. The set-up is formulaic as all get-out, though, reading like a cross between The Breakfast Club and Clue, and the tropes are as well worn as the types; the novel’s end offers a few surprising twists but an anticlimactic, oddly preachy final reveal. Nonetheless, readers will appreciate Amber’s narrative voice, which keeps the increasingly harried reality close without devolving into hysteria, and readers who love a thoroughly absorbing nail-biter may find satisfaction in the thrills here.