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The Escape Room

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About the Author

About the Book

The Escape Room

August 2019

I started listening to THE ESCAPE ROOM by Megan Goldin on CD while I was running around town doing errands. I came home and plucked a copy of the galley from my shelf (my other choice was to play the CDs over our outdoor speaker system, and I could not see my music-loving husband going for that), and spent a lovely afternoon in the pool reading this fast-paced story. Before I knew it, I was 200 pages in and wrapped up reading it that same night.

Four highly competitive hedge fund traders at a Wall Street firm are summoned to come in on a weekend for a team-building exercise that takes place in an escape room. (Having done one of these a few weeks ago and failing miserably at it made it all the more interesting.) They all feel that they are above this, but are too paranoid about losing not to participate. These are people who are sharks about making money and winning, and they will compete at any cost.

They soon start to realize that this is not a typical exercise; there’s a hidden meaning that they’re uncovering, and it’s sending them in a direction that they never saw coming. As the story unfolds, we see why each of them has ended up in that room, and why they will have trouble getting out. Revenge is a powerful weapon!

I emailed Megan to ask how she wrote this well about the world of New York finance, given her background reporting from the Middle East and that she is now living in Australia. I felt that I was very inside this competitive world. She replied, “When I lived in Singapore, there were a couple of investment banks in my office buildings and quite a lot of bankers living in my apartment complex. I have to admit that I am a bit of a people watcher and conversation listener in elevators, so I absorbed quite a lot from those interactions.

“In addition, I read whatever I could about that world and then went onto investment banker and Wall Street broker forums and social media feeds and trawled through thousands of conversations and comments until I had a pretty good sense of what their life was like. In addition, I have friends who worked at banks. Over the years they used to tell me about the office politics, especially all the fun and games around bonus time. So that helped too.”

This is definitely a one-sit thriller!

The Escape Room
by Megan Goldin