Title: The Team
Author: JL Raven
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 200 Pages
Category: Psychological Thriller, Suspense
Rating: 5 Stars
At a Glance: Suspenseful and disturbing in only the best ways, The Team is a great psychological thriller that explores what may push someone to take an eye for an eye.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: The opportunity of a lifetime might get her killed.
When her boss comes down with a bout of food poisoning, lowly corporate accountant Lauren gets an offer she can’t refuse: take his place at an exclusive team-building retreat with senior management.
The retreat is held at a remote lodge, and the rules are strict: no cell phones, no computers, and no contact with the outside world. Events take a sinister turn when a freak snowstorm leaves them trapped far from civilization…and Lauren discovers they aren’t alone in the wilderness.
As a stranger with a hidden motive stalks the team, revelations unfold and buried resentments boil over. And when the ties holding them together begin to fray, the greatest threat to their survival might be each other.
Review: If you’re familiar with Jordan L. Hawk’s body of work, you may want to introduce yourself to JL Raven. The authors are one and the same, and his debut thriller, The Team, is a bloodthirsty cocktail of revenge and corruption.
A team-building exercise runs afoul in the midst of in-fighting, backstabbing, ego-baiting, and a snowstorm that strands a selfish, unethical, and narcissistic group of friends with an outsider and a wilderness instructor. “The team” is made up of the executives of the Agonarch Corporation, and Lauren, who isn’t even a rung on the corporate ladder let alone near the top of it. Lauren has ambitions, though. What those ambitions are become clearer as the story unfolds.
The only way this is a forced proximity, stranded-in-a-snowstorm story is in its nightmarish isolation that devolves into a hellscape of manipulation and murder. The why is revealed through several characters who are truly unsympathetic. When I say that, I mean I knew immediately who I wanted to die first. The how is the pièce de résistance. It’s the payoff for the revelations that come before, and Raven doles it all out deftly. Satisfaction in the resolution to the story, however, depends on how willing you are to see the gray area between the black and white.
Suspenseful and disturbing in only the best ways, The Team is a great psychological thriller that explores what may push someone to take an eye for an eye.
You can buy The Team here:
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