Welcome to Pay to Stay, Los Angeles’s premier minimum-security facility where the privileged serve time Friday to Monday only. But this New Year’s weekend, seven inmates—including a driven campaign manager, a disgraced nurse, a party girl, and one mysterious male transfer—discover their abusive guard dead, wrapped in an ironic “Community Payback” vest. Now they must solve his murder before their cushy arrangement becomes a permanent stay in maximum security.
As a storm rages outside and the power fails, alliances shift within. With police knocking at their door and an emotional support iguana named Nacho as their witness, these inmates hustle to collect evidence and plan a killer party—all while dodging suspicion. Because someone in this concrete block is a murderer. And everyone is a suspect. But as New Year’s Eve approaches and bodies pile up, these unlikely allies discover that in Pay to Stay, some debts can only be paid in blood.
"Is this seriously happening? We're going to puppet a dead man so we can go to a morgue to solve a murder? Is this Mad libs from hell?"
After all I've heard about Ms Flynns writing, I already knew I was in for something diabolically exciting in this book. But before I even saw her name, this concept had a chokehold on me — you can’t take the locked room murder mystery any further than a literal prison, right?
First, the disparity in the justice system is something hopefully we all know about, but this book highlights a very real way that money and privilege can make “doing your time” even easier if you can afford it and the very flawed state of the incarceration systems in place across the world.
We grow complex relationships with the cast- they’re undeniably privileged, spoiled to be able to be there but ranging from prison staff, petty criminals, aging yogi’s with pet lizards, nuns to true psychopaths. It’s almost a cabin fever effect with the reader and them; growing to worry, care and potentially even like some of our inmates. The lines between what a criminal really is become so blurred in the most mind-fuckingly brilliant way that you’re not sure what to think as the inmates try to solve the murder, catch a killer and prove their innocence in one of the most surreally entertaining mysteries I've ever read.
At under 250 pages, Payback is a fairly quick read with jumping perspectives between three key players across five days that change everything. It’s pacey, frantic and loaded with suspicion, flipping between awkward comedy and genuine fear. There was a bit of lull in the midway mark but then we got rolling away It’s a devilishly entertaining mixture of camp comedy, bloody murder and a classic whodunnit.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Payback will be released on May 5th 2026 with Thomas & Mercer. I received an advanced reviewers copy of this title.
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