Submission 4055

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Author: Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss

Published: 2025

Genre: MysteryandThriller

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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What happens when the game you signed up to play turns out to be the least dangerous thing in the room? The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss is a propulsive, cleverly constructed thriller that drops its contestants and its readers into a reality television competition where the puzzles are genuinely brilliant, and the stakes are genuinely lethal. Six months ago, season four ended with a body on set. Now season five is underway, and among the new contestants is Sierra Angelos, sister of the murdered Alicia, publicly suspected, privately determined. As Team Helsing works their way through increasingly complex escape rooms, the clues they uncover begin to point somewhere the producers never intended. Fast-paced, intricately plotted, and anchored by a found-family dynamic that earns every moment of warmth it generates, this is a novel that makes mystery genuinely fun and then reminds you, at precisely the right moments, that someone already died.

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The Escape Game is one of television's most beloved competitions, a reality show built around elaborate escape rooms, each designed to test a different combination of skills, each harder than the last. When season four ended in tragedy with contestant Alicia Angelos found dead on set, the show went dark. Six months later, it is back, with new contestants, new rooms, and the implicit promise that what happened last time will not happen again. Sierra Angelos knows that a promise is worth nothing. She also knows that public opinion has quietly assigned her guilt for her sister's death, a suspicion she has been living with and that has shaped every decision she has made since. She has not come to season five to win the competition. She has come because the answers to what really happened to Alicia are somewhere on that set, and she intends to find them. Her team, Team Helsing, consists of four contestants who arrive with their own motivations, their own skill sets, and their own secrets: Adi the cryptographer, Carter the math whiz, and Beck, who wants nothing more than to master the art of the game. Each brings something essential. None of them, initially, fully trusts the others. The novel's structure mirrors the competition itself: each round brings a new escape room, rendered with visual detail and genuine puzzle ingenuity, and each room brings new clues not just about the game's challenges but about Alicia's murder and the identity of the person responsible. What begins as a competition thriller gradually tightens into something with considerably higher stakes, as it becomes clear that whoever killed Alicia has not finished with the show — and that Team Helsing, in their pursuit of the truth, may have made themselves the next target.

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- “Justice Outside Official Channels”: Sierra's central motivation, the decision to pursue her sister's killer herself, through the very venue where the crime occurred, rather than waiting for a justice system that has already decided she is guilty, gives the novel a moral urgency that elevates it beyond genre entertainment. She is not simply a protagonist seeking the truth. She is a person for whom the official mechanisms of justice have already failed, and who has concluded that the only reliable path to accountability runs through her. This is a theme with genuine contemporary resonance, and Meyer and Moss handle it with more seriousness than the novel's thriller packaging might initially suggest. - “Found Family Under Pressure”: Team Helsing begins as a strategic alliance and becomes something considerably more meaningful, and the novel traces that transition with genuine care. Each team member arrives carrying their own damage, their own reasons for being there, and their own reluctance to trust. What gradually forms between them through shared danger, through the discovery of unexpected connections, through the specific intimacy of people who have faced something terrifying together, is the kind of bond that the found family trope exists to celebrate. Meyer and Moss earn it properly: the warmth feels deserved because the difficulty that preceded it was real. - “The Reality Television Machine”: The novel uses its reality TV setting with intelligence, treating the genre not just as a backdrop but as a subject. The snippets of producer notes, contestant audition tapes, and post-game interviews that punctuate the narrative create a layer of meta-commentary about how reality television constructs narrative, assigns roles, and shapes public perception, sometimes with the consent of the participants and sometimes entirely without it. Sierra's public image as a murder suspect has been partly manufactured by the show's machinery, and the novel is aware of the irony of her returning to that machinery to dismantle it. - “Puzzles as Both Literal and Metaphorical Challenge”: The escape rooms in The Escape Game are not decorative. They are genuinely, satisfyingly difficult, the kind of puzzles that invite the reader to solve them alongside the contestants, and that reward the attempt with the particular pleasure of a well-constructed problem elegantly resolved. But they function metaphorically as well: each room is a contained world with its own rules, and navigating it requires exactly the skills the novel most prizes: careful observation, lateral thinking, and the willingness to question initial assumptions. These are also not coincidentally the skills required to solve a murder. - “Grief, Suspicion, and the Cost of Being Disbelieved”: Sierra's grief for Alicia runs beneath every page of the novel, never loudly announced but always present, shaping her decisions, her relationships, and her capacity for trust. Equally present is the specific damage of being publicly suspected of something you did not do: the way it isolates, the way it distorts every subsequent interaction, the way it makes the truth feel both more necessary and less achievable. Meyer and Moss handle this with empathy and without melodrama, giving Sierra's emotional reality the weight it deserves alongside the thriller mechanics.

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- The Escape Rooms Themselves. Each room is a distinct creative achievement, visually specific, mechanically ingenious, and narratively purposeful. The decision to include illustrations of each room in the relevant section is a structural choice that pays dividends: it grounds the reader in the physical space, makes the puzzle-solving feel participatory, and gives the novel a quality of immersion that pure prose description could not achieve as effectively. These are not generic thriller settings. They are worlds unto themselves, and the care in their construction is evident. - Sierra's Arc. She is the novel's emotional centre, and her growth across the competition from isolated, suspected, and guarded to something more open, more connected, and more willing to trust is handled with genuine sensitivity. Her grief and her determination are never separated: the love for Alicia is what drives the pursuit of justice, and every step forward in the investigation is also a step deeper into what was lost. Her relationship with the rest of Team Helsing is the novel's warmest thread, and it earns its warmth. - The Producer Notes and Audition Tapes. The structural device of including production materials, audition snippets, producer annotations, and post-game interviews is one of the novel's cleverest choices. It creates dramatic irony, providing context that the contestants don't have access to, and it builds the world of the show with an authenticity that makes the satire of reality TV land alongside the thriller plot rather than separately from it. These fragments also advance the mystery; the post-game interviews with Alicia, in particular, carry the specific poignancy of hearing from someone who didn't survive. - Team Helsing's Chemistry. The four contestants arrive as individuals and become a unit, and the process of that becoming is rendered with the specific attention it requires. Their skills complement each other in ways that feel organic rather than convenient, and their individual secrets, which turn out to be connected in ways none of them anticipated, give the found-family dynamic an additional layer of complexity. The feeling, by the novel's end, that something genuinely irreplaceable has formed between these four people is the novel's most lasting emotional achievement.

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The Escape Game has a broad and enthusiastic potential readership, and it will satisfy several distinct appetites simultaneously. If you love mystery and thriller fiction with a puzzle element, the kind of story that invites you to solve alongside the protagonist, that plants its clues fairly and rewards careful reading, this novel is constructed with genuine craft. The escape room format creates a natural architecture for clue deployment, and Meyer and Moss use it with structural intelligence. Readers who enjoy putting the pieces together before the characters do will find this a particularly satisfying experience. If you are a fan of reality television as a cultural phenomenon or if you find reality TV's construction of narrative and persona a source of genuine fascination, the novel's insider treatment of the genre offers an additional layer of pleasure. The production materials woven through the text give the show a convincing texture, and the way the format shapes the contestants' public identities is handled with more nuance than the thriller plot requires. If you love found family dynamics and want a thriller that gives them proper space rather than using them as a backdrop, Team Helsing delivers. The relationships here are developed with care, the connections between the characters have genuine emotional weight, and the bond that forms under pressure feels earned rather than assumed. Readers who finish the novel wanting more time with these four people will be in good company. If you are a younger reader or if you enjoy fiction aimed at the YA end of the spectrum that does not condescend to its audience, this novel handles serious subject matter (murder, grief, systemic injustice, the damage of public suspicion) with respect and without sanitisation, while maintaining an energy and pace that makes it compulsively readable. A note on expectations: this is the first book in what promises to be a continuing series, and it is structured so that the central mystery resolves accordingly, but the world and the characters are clearly being established for further adventures. Readers who prefer entirely self-contained stories may want to know that going in. Those who find themselves invested in Team Helsing, which, based on the novel's track record, is most of them, will consider the promise of a second book a feature rather than a caveat.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.