All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban #BookReview

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?

All Your Twisted Secrets is a slick YA mystery thriller that I decided to read when I learned Urban’s third novel Lying in the Deep (another novel with a locked room setting on a cruise ship), is going to be released in 2023. I’m forever trying to catch up with my tbr pile and I’m so happy I finally took the plunge with her debut. I had a good feeling about this novel and I was right, it made me a happy reader.

Amber finds herself locked up with 5 other teenagers in what she thinks is a dinner that could earn her a scholarship for the school of her dreams. Also present are her boyfriend Robbie, a boy she used to be friends with Diego, Priya who she has fallen out with over her friendship with Sasha, Sasha her newest friend and the one who holds Amber’s future in her hands, and Scott who she doesn’t know very well but who’s rumored to be the school’s drug dealer. In the room with them is a ticking time bomb and a syringe with poison so they have to decide… to kill or be killed. Tick tock!

In alternating chapters there’s on the one hand the panic setting in and heated discussions about who they are going to sacrifice for the group and why, and flashbacks to the past school year where the history between the different characters was explored. The present shows that there’s always a lot more to be discovered when you scratch that surface and so secrets and truths are revealed that consequently have an impact on the group dynamics.

Yes this novel reminded me in a way of One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus and they have every right to be named in the same sentence. Maybe I rated that other novel a little higher because I had no idea how that was going to end and I sort of knew here, even though I had some reservations because the threat seemed more than real.. and if they didn’t die from a bomb or poison, it would probably be from the heat in the room or from killing each other in some other way. Even though I knew some of it, All Your Twisted Secrets still had a few more twists up its sleeve that I couldn’t have predicted and that all made up for it. The secrets really intensified towards the end and the last one was definitely the worst. I couldn’t stand one of the characters after this reveal!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading All Your Twisted Secrets, it was an addictive novel that made me want to read one more chapter every time I thought of putting it down for the night. I found myself a new author and I can’t wait to read her next novel!

I bought an ecopy of this novel. This is my honest opinion.