Mystery/Thriller -- 2 1/2 stars
In 1997, in Lincoln, Nebraska there is a place called the Quigley House, a nationally famous, full contact escape room house. Make it through all five rooms without yelling "Reprieve," and you could win a substantial cash prize. On April 27 a team of four young people make it into cell 5. One of them isn't going to make it out. ----- Instead of a night of puzzle solving fun, the current popularity of escape room adventures is twisted into a macabre fight for survival. I'll give James Han Mattson points for imagination, but I wouldn't want to spend Halloween at his house. Mr. Mattson does a fine job of creating the atmosphere of Quigley House with just the right amount of increasing creepiness. He makes sure the reader understands the team members by presenting well written back stories, though he never explains why Quigley House's owner is so taken with one of them. Still, that adds to the off-kilter relationships the owner seems to forge with employees and friends alike. It is disappointing that, once the team makes it into the cells, the well orchestrated character development is left on the cutting room floor. Who they are is forgotten. The cells would seem to offer a chance for the characters to respond as individuals, rather than four people suddenly rendered generic and interchangeable. Five rooms of gross-out and a purposeless addendum doom this story to the could-have-been bin.
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