Seven strangers. Seven secrets. One perfect crime.

When Amelia is invited to an all-expenses-paid retreat on a private island, the mysterious offer is too good to refuse. Along with six other strangers, she’s told they’re here to test a brand-new product for Timeo Technologies. But the guests’ excitement soon turns to terror when the real reason for their summons becomes clear.

Each guest has a guilty secret. And when they’re all forced to wear a memory-tracking device that reveals their dark and shameful deeds to their fellow guests, there’s no hiding from the past. This is no luxury retreat—it’s a trap they can’t get out of.

As the clock counts down to the lavish end-of-day party they’ve been promised, injuries and in-fighting split the group. But with no escape from the island—or the other guests’ most shocking secrets—Amelia begins to suspect that her only hope for survival is to be the last one standing. Can she confront her own dark past to uncover the truth—before it’s too late to get out?

I generally thought I was walking into another disaster, having already experienced the ups and downs of what ‘strangers trapped’ can mean in a book. So, I think I was probably leaning towards torturing myself with this book but still felt filled with yearning hope. I’m pleased to say that the yearning hope won out. This book was PHENOMINAL. It only took me 2.5 hours to read and honestly, I was so engrossed in what I was reading that it took me a while to remember that I should have been doing other things.

The premise of this book is that seven strangers arrive on an island for a luxury experience and yet what they get is far from that. The story is told from the different POVs of the characters involved, so there was definitely an element of getting used to that fact and being able to hear the different voices come through.

There were a lot of mysteries and ‘red herrings’ throughout this book that definitely added to the enjoyment and allowed the reader to form many theories and opinions that weren’t helped along by anything.

The characters were believable and interesting and the act of seeing them in their most vulnerable and horrifying moments was kind of intriguing. It makes you think more about how everyone is different and how you don’t really know what another person is capable of. As you all know, I love books that make me think about human actions, so this book played into that theme very well.

The aggressor (villain/final guilty party/etc) was incredibly complex and we only really get a taste of who they are. I did understand from the first chapter, what the journey of the book would be but I haven’t added this to ‘what didn’t’ because there were so many added turned and surprise hole so information that it distracted me from what was coming and gave me new facts to focus on. It was quite ingenious in continually feeding new information and changing the suspicion from one character to another.

In many way, as much as I loved all parts of this book it was the aggressor who fell a little short. The aggressor was still amazing and captured very well on paper but I think there could have been a bigger scope for them and a deeper stretch of information about them. That is perhaps a little picky but towards the end I started to feel that besides it being ‘great’, that there was a disconnect in what was being said and what was left unsaid.

I see this a lot in crime books where the climax doesn’t match up to the end of the book. It’s either rushed, half finished, or like James Bond’s Spectre, relies on a hidden feature that wasn’t mentioned at all in the book or any that came before it. I think – and I’m talking only from personal experience here – that it can sometimes be hard to find enough steam to finish the book. You get so exhausted that sometimes, the easiest way is what ends up happening.

However, I’m not saying the above is what happened in this book because it was way more fleshed out and I had a great grasp of the characters by the time I had finished. I am just greedy and wanted more information on how the aggressor got to that point. The aggressor was made to look very ‘crazy’ but without any other substance which made them feel a little 2 dimensional and less like a real character.

My heart kept racing while I read this, and I was reading at such a fast pace that the words sometimes blurred on the screen! It’s evident that I enjoyed this book from how long it took me to read it. It’s a very action based and adrenaline fuelled book with many different perspectives to dive into. It’s also a relatively short book with only 291 pages, so I’d class it as more of a ‘cozy afternoon read’ than anything else but I really did enjoy reading it.

I’d recommend this to others.

What did you think of it?