When the first anonymous message comes through her phone, Crystal thinks she is being trolled again, but she soon realizes that her sister has indeed been kidnapped and is being held hostage, while the person who took her forces Crystal into playing a game of increasingly bizarre and violent tasks with a 24-hour time limit. THESE DEADLY GAMES reminded me a little bit of HOW WE FALL APART by Katie Zhao, so I think readers who enjoy those kinds of driven, fast-paced suspenseful stories will probably like this one a lot more than I did.A gamer is forced into the deadliest challenge she will ever engage in. Other than the character disconnect, I thought it was a pretty intense read, definitely something readers who like Karen McManus or R. The story didn’t hook me in the way that I wanted to.

I didn’t really understand the stakes of the secret that Crystal and her friends kept from the past. She blamed her mom for not getting help when her dad was abusing her, but blamed herself for her dad leaving.Ĭrystal had a conflict with one of her team members that didn’t really make sense to me, either. Sometimes conflicted characters– where they feel two opposing things simultaneously– are really gripping, but something about Crystal’s character just didn’t click with me. She seemed to have a lot of emotional contradictions. What I found challenging, though, was connecting with Crystal. So there are a lot of moving parts to the story. Her mom and sister are important characters, plus a few other rivals and side characters. Crystal and five of her close friends are on an esports team together preparing for a tournament game. It moves really quickly, and has a fairly large cast. I knew as soon as I started reading this book that it was going to be a tough one for me. Is someone trying to take her team out of the running for a gaming tournament? Or have they uncovered a secret from their past, and wants them to pay for what they did…Īs Crystal makes the impossible choices between her friends and her sister, she must uncover the truth and find a way to outplay the kidnapper… before it’s too late.Īuthor of ALL YOUR TWISTED SECRETS, Diana Urban’s explosive sophomore novel, THESE DEADLY GAMES, will keep you riveted until the final twist is revealed. But if she refuses to play, the kidnapper will kill her sister. At first, they make her complete bizarre tasks: steal a test and stuff it in a locker, bake brownies, make a prank call.īut then Crystal realizes each task is meant to hurt-and kill-her friends, one by one. When Crystal Donavan gets a message on a mysterious app with a video of her little sister gagged and bound, she agrees to play the kidnapper’s game. And if you tell your parents or anyone else, she dies. Published FebruAmazon | Bookshop | Goodreads About These Deadly Games

Diana urban these deadly games