Lockdown -- a review by George Morejon

Lockdown - Escape from Furnace

by Alexander Gordon Smith

**** stars

Lockdown takes place in an underground prison located in England. In this future, England has changed for the worse since the "Summer of Slaughter", and event where local youth gangs all went on murderous rampages. This changed the English view of youth crimes to a zero-tolerance policy for any crime. And when kids break this rule, they are sent to Furnace.

Furnace is a giant underground jail made to keep all the juvenile kids who break the law. Imprisonment there is taken to extremes, with the public knowing little about it, besides the fact that its for-life sentences are the hardest in the world.

Something is odd about this jail though when Alex is sent there for killing his best friend, Toby, while robbing a house, which he swears he didn't do it. The court sentences him to life in Furnace. The jail is even more terrifying in person, and going down is even worse. The first thing he does is upsetting the leader of the Skulls (the local gang). His cellmate Donovan, a long time inmate of 5 years, helps teach him the ropes of Furnace: get back to your cell when the sirens go off, avoid fights, stay out of the way, know your place. But Alex isn't a very good listener, getting into a fight with some skulls for beating someone and not making it back to his cell in time. His narrow escape from a mutant dog and watching it kill the kid he was fighting with teaches him a lesson: he has to escape. While on labour duty one day, he gets an idea for escaping through one of the boarded-up, caved-in tunnels. He needs a plan of escape though, and how can you really escape from a place that's ten kilometres underground?

Maybe it's just me, but this is another quick read. It kept me on edge through the whole book, with unexpected turns and surprises. It's the first book in the Escape from Furnace series, the second being Solitary, which came out this year (ed note: December 2010 release). The ending is kind of a cliff-hanger that sets up for the next book, but as a stand alone read, it'd be a bit disappointing.