No one is writing pure action thrillers anymore. I mean, yes it’s a thriller and I read an endless amount of thrillers, but the genre is packed with “girl” titles and unreliable narrators that are just continually trying to out-clever each other.

Darby sets out to rescue the little girl and keep her safe until sunrise when civilization is set to start digging itself out from under the knee-deep snow. As Darby sets out into the snow to pick up just one bar of signal in order to call her family, Darby stumbles upon a little girl in a dog kennel inside the back of a van that belongs to one of the four strangers inside. Inside the rest stop, there are four other stranded people and zero cell reception. Left with no other options due to road closures, accidents and a lack of plows on the road since it’s Christmas Eve, Darby is forced to pull into a mountainside rest stop until it’s safe to drive again.

Speaking of mothers, Mother Nature has other plans and Darby soon finds herself driving her beat-up Honda – no snow tires and less one windshield wiper – into Snowmageddon, a devastating blizzard that is making travel nearly impossible. The surgery or cancer could take her mother’s life at any moment so Darby really has no time to waste, despite her complicated feelings towards her mom. I do it because I love you and I want you to have an honest opinion from someone who isn’t worried about feelings and blah blah blah.ĭarby is travelling from Denver to Utah in order to see her mother before she has surgery for pancreatic cancer which will hopefully prolong her life. You want easy stars? Go to the reviewers who aren’t dead inside with a stick up their ass. And my friends and regular readers know I don’t give out my stars easily. I would honestly give this five stars just based on the writing skill alone. It would be easy to say it was written with a movie option in mind (and maybe it was,) but maybe the plotting and timing of the story are just so fucking just good that the writing takes on a vibrant cinematic quality, and therefore, it seems like it should be a movie. Reading No Exit was an exercise in cinematic writing. Whose fault is that really? Mine? Because of my choices? Get out of here! I don’t want to hear it! And thank the god of thunder, because I was starting to get a little cranky as nothing has really been knocking my bits off. This is my first five-star read of the year. Filed Under: Did we learn nothing about isolated rest stops from Michael Meyers?!

Goodreads no exit