Six months have passed since a contestant on The Escape Game was found dead inside a prop coffin during what should have been a season finale. The show survived. The case did not. And the girl the public decided was responsible is back for another round.
The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss opens not in the middle of a puzzle room but in the moments just before one, and the decision pays off immediately. The prologue rewinds to the night of Alicia Angelos’s death, told from her sister Sierra’s perspective, and it establishes something useful quickly: this is a story about what gets remembered, what gets distorted, and who gets to carry the blame. By the time the present-day narrative begins, with four new contestants filing into auditions for season five, the reader already knows what the characters do not yet fully grasp. The game has consequences.
The Four Contestants
The book rotates between four points of view, each introduced through an audition video format that earns its keep. The gap between who these teenagers present themselves to be and who they actually are becomes the emotional engine of the story.
Carter is a math genius with a high-ranking profile on the show’s fan community, where she presents herself as a polished cartoon avatar called Kick It Carter. In person, she can barely make eye contact with strangers. Beck is a trans boy raised on a Montana ranch who builds his own escape rooms as a hobby and has synesthesia: sounds arrive in his mouth as specific flavors, a detail that is handled with enough consistency to feel essential rather than decorative. Adi is guarded, handsome, and reluctant, dragged onto the show by his celebrity mother under circumstances he is not ready to explain. Sierra, the team’s unofficial leader, is the most complicated of all. She is prickly and cynical, accustomed to being cast as the villain, and carrying grief she barely knows how to name.
The multi-POV structure of The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss works precisely because these four voices do not blur together. Carter’s anxiety is specific and earned, not a personality shorthand. Beck’s relentless optimism never tips into obliviousness; he is the kind of person who genuinely attends to the people around him. Adi’s arc takes the longest to come into focus, and there are stretches where his backstory feels overloaded, but he earns his place in the finale. Sierra, however, is where the book finds its real depth. Her relationship with Alicia, fractured by competition and unspoken feeling, is pieced together across the novel in a way that makes the emotional stakes feel proportionate to the mystery.
What the Book Gets Right
The escape room sequences are constructed with unusual care. Solutions are always fair, never arbitrary, and a reader following the clues can keep pace with the characters. That quality matters enormously in a book asking the audience to believe that teenagers solving staged puzzles are simultaneously uncovering a genuine murder. The rooms have to feel genuinely difficult, and they do.
The reality television backdrop is used with more intelligence than the premise might suggest. The producer notes appended to each audition video are funny and faintly sinister. The show’s Clue Master fan community feels like a world with its own interior logic. The dynamic between what the cameras capture and what they miss becomes, in time, an actual structural element of the mystery.
Several other choices land well:
- The red herrings are planted early enough that they feel fair in retrospect rather than manipulative
- The chemistry among the four protagonists develops at a pace that feels organic rather than accelerated by plot necessity
- Beck’s synesthesia is put to practical narrative use in a way that the reader will not see coming until it matters
- The audition video format, repeated for each new character introduction, captures the performed self versus the actual self with economy and wit
The social media dimension of the story, the fan forums and coded posts and online speculation around Alicia’s death, adds a layer that feels true to how teenagers actually process public events.
Where It Struggles
The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss does ask the reader to keep a great many plates spinning. The second half of the book, in particular, introduces several revelations in rapid succession, and one central character who turns out to be significant spent much of the story at the margins. The misdirection that allows this works mechanically, but it may leave some readers feeling the setup was thinner than the payoff warranted.
The novel also ends on a clear continuation, with a “To be continued” note that is honest but will frustrate readers who prefer closure. The threads left open are intriguing, and the world built here has room for more story. But the balance between satisfaction and sequel-tease leans heavier on the latter than it might have.
These are real limitations, not minor quibbles. The book earns a strong recommendation, but readers should go in knowing that the story is not yet complete.
About the Authors and Similar Reads
Marissa Meyer is best known for The Lunar Chronicles, the fairy tale retelling series beginning with Cinder (2012), as well as standalones like Heartless and Instant Karma and the Renegades trilogy. Her instinct for plot construction and ensemble character work is visible throughout The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss. Tamara Moss brings a complementary voice to the collaboration, and the two writers appear well-matched in tone. The book reads as a unified piece of work rather than a divided one.
Readers who enjoyed this should consider:
- The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, for puzzle-driven plotting with an ensemble cast
- One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus, for competitive social dynamics and a murder everyone has an opinion about
- Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson, for institutional mystery with an eccentric setting
- The Only One Left by Riley Sager, for secrets embedded in architecture and the gap between reputation and truth
- We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, for fractured family dynamics and grief that arrives sideways
A Game Worth Playing
The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss knows exactly what kind of book it wants to be and mostly delivers. It is fast, funny in the right places, and built around characters who are worth the time spent with them. The mystery holds together. The escape rooms are genuinely inventive. And Sierra Angelos, searching for justice in a world that decided she was guilty before the body was cold, is the kind of protagonist readers will want to follow into whatever comes next.
The real game, it turns out, has only just begun.
