A little bit And Then There Were None, a little bit The Breakfast Club, a little bit Dangerous Girls. A whole of intrigue and secrets.


All Your Twisted Secrets
by Diana Urban

This thrilling debut, reminiscent of new fan favorites like One of Us Is Lying and the beloved classics by Agatha Christie, will leave readers guessing until the explosive ending.

Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting.

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die? 


Wow. Not only is this debut thriller wickedly entertaining, devious in all its secrets and mysteries, it's deeply moving. My heart was able to break into about a billion pieces just as easily as it tried to jump straight from my chest. There's a part of me that feels wrong not giving All Your Twisted Secrets five stars, because it's definitely going on my best of the year list, but the other part of me felt wholly unsatisfied with the way the novel ended.  

Because everything leading up to its conclusion it was near perfection. Hell, the conclusion would have been all the more fulfilling if it'd been less open-ended. And this is from somebody who doesn't normally mind those types of endings.

But, realistically, this is the only flaw to be noted within All Your Twisted Secrets. It was fiery in its duel timelines, embraced that uneasy and unreliable quality I salivate over. The final quarter of the story, too, is explosive and full of the most delicious kind of tension. In short? This is one of the best thrillers of the year and the best way to start the new decade.

How can I describe All Your Twisted Secrets? Enthralling. Secretion. All consuming.

It's not everyday that a thriller wholly consumes me. The problem is I read far too many of them. I'm overly analytical, too, so sometimes I'm able to solve the story before it has its chance to unravel for me. And, to be honest, it's even less often that a YA thriller manages to engross me so much that I'm quick to lose hours and hours to it.

The best thrillers are the ones that burrow under your skin in questions and answers. The characters sharp enough to cut. All Your Twisted Secrets is, without a doubt, one of those novels.

Not only was this a solid mystery, these characters felt like real young adults. Their dynamics were interesting and it added an extra cut of chill to an already chilling narrative. Diana Urban takes her readers on a journey of youthful questions and betrayals with just the right amount of plot-twists. I genuinely appreciated the archetypes that were used in All Your Twisted Secrets because it made the unraveling process land on the sharpest of outcomes. 

While I did sense where the story was going at its core, the outcome did actually surprise me. It was familiar but still had an edge of unpredictable to it. The sort of unpredictable that comes around and causes you to nearly flinch back in shock or horror.

Ultimately, All Your Twisted Secrets is a fantastic story that managed to captivate me intensely I was unable to put it down and continued thinking about it as I lay in bed the night after finishing. Days later and there's still this buzzed quality to my mind when I recollect Diana Urban's prose. All Your Twisted Secrets is destined to echo in the minds of readers.

Now all that's left to do is anticipate the day where I can buy my own physical copy of this novel and annotate it. If you're looking for an entertaining thriller, look no further than All Your Twisted Secrets.