Device Free Weekend

Ryan Cloverhill, founder and CEO of the world's most popular social media platform, invites six friends from his college years to his private island home near Puget Sound for a weekend with one rule: no devices. The first day is exactly the escape they wanted — good food, drink, and a sunset cruise around the island.

The second day is not. The guests wake to find their host gone and every connection to the mainland severed. In his place sits a tablet displaying a single instruction: Unlock Me. The passcode is buried somewhere in the group's shared history, and what waits behind it turns a party game into a decision none of them wants to make.

Sean Doolittle's standalone thriller works as a closed-circle puzzle and as an argument about the people who build the platforms the rest of us live on. The pressure comes less from violence than from a group of old friends forced to bargain with each other under a clock.