The Escape Room

Vincent, Jules, Sylvie and Sam work at the Wall Street firm Stanhope & Sons, and all four are high earners. A mandatory team-building event calls them away from their desks. They expect a standard escape room with a one-hour limit.

The elevator they step into stops moving inside an unfinished office building. The doors stay shut. The puzzles that appear are meant for these four people in particular, and each clue brings up a secret one of them thought was buried.

The book alternates between two strands. One follows the group in the stalled elevator. The other is told in the first person by Sara Hall, a young woman who arrived at the firm with high hopes and then saw how it treated the people below its top earners.

The elevator scenes are confined and tense, a locked-room thriller played out in one small space. Sara's chapters supply the background. The question running through both is what happened to her, and which of the four will do anything to get out alive.