Eight hours. Twelve contestants. A flight none of them might survive. A flight to Paris full of teenagers seeking opportunity turns deadly in this suspenseful, locked-door YA thriller. Perfect for fans of Diana Urban, Karen McManus, and Jessica Goodman.
Seventeen-year-old boarding school student Emily Walters is selected for an opportunity of a lifetime—she’ll compete abroad for a cash prize that will cover not only tuition to the college of her choice, but will lift her mother and her out of poverty.
But almost from the moment she and 11 other contestants board a private jet to Europe, Emily realizes somebody is willing to do anything to win. Between keeping an eye on her best friend’s flirty boyfriend and hiding her own dark secrets, she’s not sure how she’ll survive the contest, much less the flight. Especially when people start dying…
As loyalties shift and secrets are revealed, Emily must figure out who to trust, and who’s trying to kill them all, before she becomes the next victim.
It's hard to have a proper locked room mystery these days. Everyone has phones, and it's difficult to find a reasonable excuse that they can't be used. It often feels like an imposed rule that makes no sense.
But this worked really well! A luxury plane over the Atlantic, with communications messed with so that no one outside the plane knows that anything is wrong. It's a very clever idea, well executed.
I would have liked a map of the plane; as one of the characters did, I went online and looked up plans, but there are several different ones for this class of plane and none matched to what the characters were doing. I'm very visual and I would have liked to be able to plot what the characters were doing - but I'm reading a proof and the finished copy may include a plan.
There were quite a lot of characters to keep track of, but I did manage after a while. I was surprised by the villain, too, and that doesn't always happen! Overall it's a really well written, clever thriller, and I think kids are going to really enjoy it.
Thin Air publishes on the 17th October, 2023. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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