This Escalated Quickly (and I love it XD)
This book was INCREDIBLE!! Best book I’ve read this year by a landslide. Criminey, this book is full of action! I love everything about the premise. You have two hurricanes colliding into a super storm, about to cause mini-tsunamis and flood all of Florida, and the guards realize the prison is not going to make it. They abandon the prison, but first open all the cells to give the prisoners a fighting chance of surviving.
Of course, this leads to absolute fucking pandemonium and I LOVED it. This is a prison full of incredibly violent men. As one of the guards tells a brand new guard “If Hannibal Lector were real, he’d be in here.” Well that new guard is a 5’6 115 pound woman who gets forgotten and left behind her first day on the job, the da of the superstorm. A massive storm rages outside, threatening to tear apart the prison, all while she is a small woman with no CO experience trapped with 800 rapists, murderers, gang members, and pedophiles.
Every time you think this book can’t get any more chaotic, something new happens. Just escalating chaos until the ending, which is AMAZING.
I loved Jack’s character arc. I loved the twist at the end with Sawyer’s connection to Jack (definitely didn’t see it coming, but the clues WERE there all along, just very subtle).
Felix made this freaking book for me. He’s hilarious. He’s just erratic enough to make him a wild card, but he still has a lot of kindness in him.
Oh, and best scene, hands down, the main characters are running from a group of Crips, they all round a corner and find a group of men with crosses drawn on their face and a dude in a stolen Chaplain’s clothes. The Crips see them and immediately turn and run in the opposite direction XD
This had me going “Oh shit, these guys must be bad news if the Crips immediately turn and run.” And they were. They turned out to be a gang led by a cannibal serial killer escaped from the high security unit who in the few hours since the guards abandoned the prison, performed very creative and graphic acts of violence across the prison.
The book is a wild ride of violence, action, and chaos, both nature and man made.
I binged this book in two days. It might be the best thriller I ever read.
