Holly Jackson wrote a locked-room thriller disguised as a road trip.
Let me back up. It was almost midnight, Denise already asleep, and I was finishing a stack of sophomore essays on The Great Gatsby — half of which confused the green light with a traffic signal, God bless them — when I figured I'd earned something that required zero intellectual generosity on my part. Something with a body count. Something my students might actually read willingly. So I put in my earbuds and started En af dem dør, which translates roughly to "One of Them Dies," and if that isn't the most honest title in publishing, I don't know what is.
Six Kids, One Sniper, and Zero Cell Service
The setup is almost aggressively efficient. Six young people heading to spring break. A flat tire on a deserted gravel road. No phone signal. And then — a sniper. Someone who knows them, who demands a secret from each of them, and who has already decided that only five walk away alive. Jackson wastes maybe twenty minutes of audio getting you there, and then the screws just tighten for the remaining ten-plus hours.
What I appreciate as someone who teaches narrative structure to kids who'd rather be on TikTok: Jackson understands that a good thriller isn't about the violence. It's about the secrets. Every character is carrying something, and the sniper's demand forces those secrets into the open like pressure forcing water through cracks. The group dynamics shift with every revelation. Alliances form and dissolve. Someone you trusted in hour three becomes someone you're side-eyeing by hour six. This is why we still read the classics — because the bones of Greek tragedy (hubris, hidden knowledge, inevitable reckoning) show up in a YA thriller set on a back road in the middle of nowhere, and they still work. That same pull of myth bleeding into modern storytelling is something I kept thinking about when I listened to Ich bin Circe — different genre entirely, but the same argument that the oldest human anxieties never really go out of style.
Now, is the plot airtight? No. There are moments where the characters make decisions that had me pausing and staring at the ceiling the way I stare at a student who just told me Hamlet was "basically about daddy issues." (They're not entirely wrong, but come on.) Some of the twists land with real force — there's a mid-book revelation about the connection between two characters that genuinely made me set down my red pen — and some feel like Jackson was juggling one ball too many. But the pacing rarely lets you sit with those doubts long enough to get annoyed.
Sara Line Møller Olsen and the Danish Pressure Cooker
This is a Danish-language production, and Sara Line Møller Olsen narrates solo. I'll be honest — my research turned up almost nothing specific about her performance here, no standout praise, no complaints. What I can tell you from my own listening: she carries eleven hours of escalating paranoia with a steady hand. She understands that pause is punctuation, and in a thriller built on secrets and lies, those pauses between characters — those half-seconds where someone is deciding whether to tell the truth — matter enormously. She doesn't oversell the fear. She lets the scenario do the heavy lifting, which is the right call.
That said, with six young characters all roughly the same age and background, I occasionally lost track of who was speaking during the faster exchanges. It's a common single-narrator challenge with ensemble casts, and it didn't wreck the experience, but it did pull me out of the story two or three times during critical scenes.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you loved One of Us Is Lying by Karen McManus, this is its spiritual successor — same DNA of "young people with secrets trapped in a pressure cooker," but Jackson trades the school setting for survival horror and ratchets up the physical stakes. If you enjoyed Jackson's own A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series, you already know she can plot a mystery. This one is leaner. Meaner. Less detective work, more desperation.
But if you need your thrillers to hold up under forensic logic, or if YA character decisions make you want to throw things, this might frustrate you. Jackson writes for momentum, not plausibility, and that's a trade-off you either accept or you don't.
My students would probably devour this in a single sitting. I devoured it over three nights of grading. Same energy, different caffeine levels.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
Here's the thing about Holly Jackson: she's thirty-two years old, she's written more page-turners than most authors twice her age, and she understands something fundamental about suspense — that the real terror isn't the sniper on the hill. It's the person sitting next to you who's been lying the whole time. En af dem dør isn't perfect, but it kept me awake past midnight on a school night, and at my age, that's the highest compliment I can pay a thriller.
