I received this book for free from Reviewer Purchase in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Seventeen-year-old Persey feels worthless much of the time. Her parents prefer her smarter, more enigmatic big brother to her, and she can't quite seem to succeed-let alone fit in-at school. But there is one thing she's good at: escape rooms. So when she's invited to compete in an escape room competition that carries a prize worth millions, Persey is all over it.

Persey enters the competition along with seven other young contestants, but while most escape rooms are about teamwork and collaboration, this one is all about being cut-throat-literally. When contestants start getting killed off, Persey must solve a series of bizarre and gruesome puzzles, riddles, and games to make it out alive. Along the way she learns the contestants are mysteriously related-and someone is out for vengeance.

Twenty years before Dee Guerra and the Death Row Breakfast Club took down The Postman and Alcatraz 2.0 in #MurderTrending, long before Becca survived The Juggernaut and Who Wants to Be a Painiac? In #MurderFunding, the murder games first began with one awful day at Escape-Capades, Ltd.? And there's no telling who might have made it out alive, or what they may have later become.

Short and Sweet Review

20 years before there was an Alcatraz 2.0 there was Escape-Capades. After beating an escape room Persey is invited to Las Vegas to compete in a new escape room with a grand prize. Persey along with 5 other teens enter the escape room where there’s individual puzzles and some that require teamwork. This isn’t a normal escape room, contestants begin to get killed off, and while solving puzzles we also learn that the contestants have secrets and they’re all connected in some way.

This book is only from Persey’s POV, we get to see what the escape room is like from her eyes we also get flashbacks of what her life was like before. I liked seeing all of the different rooms and how the puzzles were solved. Things do start to get gruesome when contestants start meeting their ends in different rooms. Our contestants think its a joke at first until it becomes obvious that it’s not. Persey feels the need to save everyone and look out for them even though most of them don’t deserve it. I did like Persey as a character she had a bad upbringing, but through it all she actually was smart in her own way. Some of the characters were annoying so I wasn’t too sad when they ended up being killed off.

Overall this was a pretty good book! It does give us some insight on the first book #murdertrending. I think that reading this book first instead of last and then moving on to the other two books would be a good way to read this series!