Prompt #22: Time frame less than a week

I really enjoyed Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series so have been looking forward to reading Five Survive for some time so borrowed this from the library.

What’s it about?

Eight hours.
Six friends.
One sniper . . .

Eighteen year old Red and her friends are on a road trip in an RV, heading to the beach for Spring Break. It’s a long drive but spirits are high. Until the RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere. There’s no mobile phone reception and nobody around to help. And as the wheels are shot out, one by one, the friends realise that this is no accident. There’s a sniper out there in the dark watching them and he knows exactly who they are. One of the group has a secret that the sniper is willing to kill for.

A game of cat-and-mouse plays out as the group desperately tries to get help and to work out which member of the group is the target. Buried secrets are forced to light in the cramped, claustrophobic setting of the RV, and tensions within the group will reach deadly levels. Not everyone will survive the night.

What I think:

If you are looking for something fast-paced and tense in a YA thriller then this is it.

While there is some character development, this is all about the twists and turns and the big reveals.

Red and her friends are heading to Spring Break in a borrowed TV. They are woefully underprepared for the trip, relying on phones For maps and navigation. As they head further away from the city the signal drops and they end up lost in the dark. And then their tyre blows out.

This is a classic thriller scenario and it escalates quickly as an unseen enemy shoots out their tyres leaving them trapper and surrounded until one of them gives up the secrets they are hiding.

But they are all hiding something.

The story is told from Red’s point of view. She lost her mum, a police officer, in a shooting years before and has never really recovered. Her last words to her mum have left her guilt-ridden ever since. I wasn’t sure if Red was neuro-divergent or traumatised, but she is distracted, forgetful and seen but the others in the group as generally just odd. As a narrator, I found her frustrating.

There’s a lot of arguing in this book. The panic sets in and the group of unlikely friends turn on each other. The secrets start spilling out and I found some of them a bit unrealistic.

This has a really cinematic feel. It’s set over just 8 hours so the pace is fast and there are lots of twists and reveals as we head towards an interesting climax.

This didn’t have the clever plotting and intelligence that I loved in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, but it was a quick and satisfying read.