Desperate Run

by C. J. Riggs, M. L. Burns

Max is a med student with a past she’s buried under sarcasm, one NDA, and a family who sold her out. When she and her friend group win free tickets to the Midnight Menagerie, a traveling horror-carnival where paying guests can be legally “hunted” through a weekend of escalating mazes, she’s claimed almost immediately by Grim, the carnival’s tallest, quietest, and most feared Hunter. What starts as a game becomes something neither of them expected: Grim, whose real name is Draven, is carrying his own seven-year-old grief, and the deeper Max pushes into the carnival’s trials, the more her reasons for being there and his reasons for staying start to look like two halves of the same wound.

The weekend builds through a series of increasingly dangerous mazes, each one testing something different in Max, physically, psychologically, and morally, while Draven’s own past and the carnival’s own rot come to a head around her. What she’s really hunting, and what it will actually cost her to get it, is worth discovering without it spoiled here.

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