Megan Goldin

Megan Goldin follows up her domestic noir unreliable narrator debut The Girl in Keller’s Way with something completely different. The Escape Room does what a good thriller should do. It takes something new and faddish, in this case escape room games, and makes it sinister. At the same time, Goldin takes square aim at corporate greed-is-good culture. And with new studies showing it is environment as much as personality that makes financial workers corrupt, this is a very timely thriller.

After a bloody cold open, Goldin winds the clock back 36 hours. Four corporate high fliers – team leader Vincent and his team – Sam, Jules and Sylvie – are invited to an escape room challenge. Despite reservations they go, because when the company calls, they respond. Only they quickly find out that this is no ordinary team building challenge. Stuck in an elevator (lift for those in the colonies) with no mobile reception and a series of increasingly obscure clues, the four start to turn on each other. The first clue refers to Sara Hall, neophyte financial analyst who joined their team many years before and is quickly socialised into the greed mentality of the firm. And Sara’s story, mostly narrated in first person, juxtaposes and highlights the plight of the four in the elevator.

Goldin homes in on the heartlessness, the sexism and the bullying inherent in the corporate environment. And it is in these observations that the book really shines. Sara herself, reflecting on her time and her own ambition:

I was earning a small fortune… I was exactly where I wanted to be.

The sniping, the backbiting, the lack of women in senior roles, never mind people of colour or other minorities – it was all there in plain view. But I didn’t see it. I was busy enjoying the ride. Not to mention struggling with the gruelling hours, which never seemed to let up.

And no matter how far fetched the situation becomes the human behaviour on display is very real and very pervasive. And seeing these corporate money makers slowly disintegrate as time wears on does feel satisfying.

The Escape Room is an incredibly contrived but thoroughly enjoyable thriller with a little heart. As she draws the curtain back on the underlying plan, the structure leaves Goldin needing the backload the narrative with a little too much exposition. By this time, though, astute readers will have worked things out themselves and the pleasure will be in how close they came to the actual answer. And given the speed with which many will have turned the pages to get there, they are likely to not be disappointed.

Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins have a lot to answer for. While The Girl in Kellers Way is an effective, sometimes creepy domestic thriller there are no girls in it (except for little Alice who is not a main player). The two main characters are women, and the body found in Kellers Way is also a woman. The word “Girl” in the title is the tool used to give bookshop browsers an idea that this is a domestic noir. Australian author Megan Goldin’s debut does tick off on some of the aspects of the domestic noir sub-genre indicated by the title: strained domestic relationship, creepy controlling male character and an unreliable narrator. And she does so in a way that brings something new and a little chilling to the genre.

The narrative of The Girl in Kellers Way flicks between Julie and Mel, two very different women. Julie is the second wife of charismatic psychology lecturer Matt, bringing up Alice, the daughter by his first marriage. That first marriage ended in a tragedy that is widely known in the small American university town in which they live. Julie, still jealous of the dead Laura, has been on some cocktail of drugs since a miscarriage and finds that she cannot trust the things she sees or experiences. Every time she tries to come down off the drugs and experience the world more clearly, Matt is there to keep the dosages up.

Mel is a cop, new to a town that she moved to after the death of her husband, also a policeman, in the line of duty. She is brought into the orbit of Matt and Julie when a body found in Kellers Way turns out to be that of Matt’s first wife, previously thought to have been killed by a notorious serial killer.

The early parts of the book are tough going. Julie is a strange character to get to know, and the effect of the drugs that she is taking makes her observations clearly suspect from the start. Mel, on the other hand, is a by the numbers crime genre cop with family issues and spends the first couple of her POV chapters establishing her bona fides for the reader. Mel’s solidity provides an anchor, though, as opposed to the twisting realities of Julie’s perceptions. Once the preliminaries are out of the way, Goldin settles in for a cleverly plotted thriller with a seriously creepy idea at its core, full of great final sentence cliff hangers/reveals and hints as she switches between her two main characters.

Goldin delivers her debut in an engaging style. She effectively ramps up the tension in such a way that even when secrets are revealed, readers are left guessing how the drama is going to play out. And while there are plot and tonal echoes of SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, it is not bad company to be in. Particularly as Goldin has managed to deliver a wholly original spin on domestic noir.