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The Dying Game  By  cover art

The Dying Game

By: Asa Avdic
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins, Steve West
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Publisher's summary

A masterly locked-room mystery set in a near-future Orwellian state.

The year is 2037, and on the tiny island of Isola, seven people have been selected to compete in a 48-hour test for a top-secret intelligence position with the totalitarian Union of Friendship. One of them is Anna Francis, a workaholic bureaucrat with a nine-year-old daughter she rarely sees and a secret that haunts her. Her assignment: to stage her own death and then to observe, from her hiding place inside the walls of the house, how the six other candidates react to the news that a murderer is among them. Who will take control? Who will crack under pressure? But then a storm rolls in, the power goes out, and the real game begins....

Combining suspense, unexpected twists, psychological gamesmanship, and a sinister dystopian future, The Dying Game conjures a world in which one woman is forced to ask, "Can I save my life by staging my death?"

©2017 Asa Avdic (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A deliciously creepy novel revolving around a terrific paradigm shift: The job you think you’re doing? That’s not the job you’re really doing.” (Chris Pavone, New York Times best-selling author of The Expats)

“Agatha Christie meets George Orwell in journalist Avdic’s unsettling first novel.... Avdic not only constructs a fascinating and original plot but makes her imagined reality chillingly plausible.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“A high-stakes test of survival and betrayal . . . Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None crossed-pollinated with The Most Dangerous Game.... An unsettling portrait of our possible future.” (Kirkus Reviews)

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What listeners say about The Dying Game

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Starts Slow

This is a strange book that took me a little while to begin enjoying. The novel breaks roughly into three parts. The first sets the groundwork for the story—a woman is asked to help test candidates for a very important project by pretending to be the victim of a murder. She will then, from hiding, evaluate them to determine how to deal with the stress of thinking that one of their fellow candidates is a murderer.

The second part is that plot, which quickly takes a “And Then There Was One” turn as more people die or disappear from the island. Nothing is as it seems and no one knows who to trust.

The third part is a series of interrogations in which authorities attempt to discover what really happened. This was easily the best part of the novel. The interrogations are very well done and Audic really brings out the different personalities of the people being questioned. Over the course of the interrogations and a very brief final chapter, onion skin after onion skin constantly gets pulled away, changing everything the reader thinks they know about what’s going on.

It's often tense and there are moments of true excitement. The ending definitely surprised me.

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Couldn’t stop listening

Fabulous novel, really well plotted, fascinating characters. Great to listen to on audio. I highly recommend it!

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2 people found this helpful