No Exit by Taylor Adams

***Just a warning.  I usually try to avoid telling you anything specific about the book so you can discover it on your own, in this review I reveal something that happens. This fact I talk about doesn't ruin the story for you but I can't tell you how I feel about the book without explaining why in this way.  So I guess it's a tiny spoiler but not for the whole book and certainly not for the ending.  What I tell you here happens early on.

Hello everyone.  I hope you're having a good day.

How important is a characters connection to you?  Can you love a book if you don't care for any of the people or doesn't it matter?  I've seen so many book reviews where people say they couldn't connect with the characters so they hated the book.  I think that's really interesting and I wonder if that opinion varies by genre.  I would imagine in a romance you must really care about the people involved so you can root for them to fall in love.  For a thriller, I am unsure if that is so true. I think perhaps thriller readers are looking for twists and not so much character development.  Don't get me wrong, thrillers with uninteresting characters kill a story but I think perhaps it's less important.

I recently read No Exit by Taylor Adams.  This is the story of a college student, Darby, who is going home to see her dying mother.  Darby gets stuck in a snowstorm in the Colorado Rockies and must pull over and spend the night at a Rest Area along with four others already stranded. While outside trying to find a signal for her cell phone, Darby discovers a van with a small girl locked in a cage in the back, obviously having been kidnapped.  The dilemma who of the four others inside is the kidnapper.

While I thought this book might be boring given its limited scene of the Rest Area and cast, it isn't.  In fact, it is action packed and very much a page turner. I thought I had read a total of thirty minutes yet was on page 197...obviously an engrossing book.  Ah, not only engrossing but gross, this has lots of violence and gore and it's all very graphic.  Do not read with a weak stomach.  While I enjoyed the book and loved the pacing the main character drove me crazy.  I found myself yelling at the book.  When Darby gets to speak to the kidnapped girl, does she ask any of the important questions that any normal, sane person would ask? NO, she doesn't.  I kept yelling ask the question, ask the question. Instead of asking which of the four was her kidnapper and more importantly are they armed, Darby wastes time on her name and where she's from.  If tf wasn't so annoying it would sound like a bar pick up line..."Hey, where you from?"  It happened repeatedly throughout the book. At one point Darby was so dumb and annoying I found myself actually rooting for the kidnapper!

No Exit was a great read, especially for any thriller lover.  Just beware of the dumbest heroine in history and that it is not for the squeamish.