Book Review | All Your Twisted Secrets #BlogTour @The

Even though my week seems to be getting progressively worse, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, I’m happy that I have good books to keep my spirits up, today I am on the tour for All Your Twisted Secrets.

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This thrilling debut, reminiscent of new fan favorites like One of Us Is Lying and the beloved classics by Agatha Christie, will leave readers guessing until the explosive ending.

Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting.

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die?

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All Your Twisted Secrets is the kind of book that has you hooked from the start and was very difficult to put down, there is no preamble with this book the mystery kicks in straight away and had me guessing with each new chapter. I do enjoy locked room mysteries but actually, until now I’ve watched them through TV or movies rather than read about them so this has been quite a thrilling experience for me.

The story is told in two timelines the present where the characters are all stuck in the room together and from a year before which gives us insight into how they all know or get to know each other. I really like this duality, I can feel the tension as they try to figure out what to do to find some way out of the situation they are in and then added to that is the suspense of trying to figure what it is from the past year that has put them in the situation and of course who is it that wants them there.

The mix of characters is brilliant, their differences make for some exciting reading, and having to deal with their relationships with each other during the stress of being locked in a room together gave the book a thrilling edge. None of the characters were perfect and they all had secrets but I liked that some of them were linked and it became this complex web between them all. I enjoyed having the wonder of what happened between them because of the differences portrayed between timelines and the way that these things are revealed really helped to keep a face and riveting pace.

It’s kind of hard to pick a favourite character between them all because whilst not all of them were the most likeable I could empathise with their realistic imperfection and because each character was fully fleshed with motivations that I could understand. I admired the way that Amber and Priya’s relationship developed, it was good to see a friendship that has issues and how that gets put to the test. I did a buzzfeed quiz that the author posted on her twitter to see which character I am most like and got Priya, I have to say that there were definitely a lot of resemblances but I only wish that I had her the strength that she finds towards the end of the book.

Obviously, I won’t go too much into the storyline at all except to say that I wasn’t expecting the outcome and I really admired the way the characters played off each other to create a situation that none of them would have expected. It was really well put together and I liked there is this moral dilemma about action and consequences that I was left thinking about for days afterward.

This is a fantastic debut that easily had me lost in its pages and will keep you hooked until the last line.

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For those of you in the US, if you like the sound of the book then click the link below to be in with the chance of winning…

one of two copies of ALL YOUR TWISTED SECRETS by Diana Urban

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I’m Diana Urban, and I write dark, twisty thrillers for teens including All Your Twisted Secrets (HarperTeen, March 17th 2020). When I’m not torturing fictional characters, I’m a marketing manager at BookBub, a leading book discovery platform. Outside the bookish world, I live with my husband and cat in Boston, and enjoy reading, video games, fawning over cute animals, and looking at the beach from a safe distance.

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