Do you ever find yourself so sucked into a book that you barely recognise the world around you when it's done #justme?
— Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) January 22, 2015
I had an eArc of this to review via Netgalley, but it was bizarrely corrupted with missing figures. I’m really grateful to the people behind the twitter account for organising a hard copy which arrived this morning.
I then accidentally misplaced several hours falling into the book, and emerged the other side of the story, blinking and somewhat confused.
That doesn’t happen often. For whatever reason, I don’t find it easy to get immersed in books these days -I think part of it is that I’m always reading with half an eye on the review. But this one I went in deep and didn’t want to come out at all.
Funny really, because it’s not my usual kind of read. Fast paced US YA thriller, contemporary, with *heavy* romance overtones. There’s also a thick layer of internet/tech hacking stuff, and unsurprisingly, a conspiracy. (Clue’s in the title folks.) The narration switches from the girl of the title, Nic, to the hacker, Finn, in alternate chapters, which I found a little disorienting to begin with, but worked really well, without any of the accidental spill over you sometimes get from a single view point. (You know the kind of thing I mean, where they suddenly know something they really shouldn’t.)
Blurb:
Everybody knows about the Cooper Killings.
There was only one survivor – fifteen year-old Nic Preston.
Now eighteen, Nic is trying hard to rebuild her life. But then one night her high-security apartment is broken into. It seems the killers are back to finish the job.
Finn Carter – hacker, rule breaker, player – is the last person Nic ever wants to see again. He’s the reason her mother’s murderers walked free. But as the people hunting her close in, Nic has to accept that her best chance of staying alive is by staying close to Finn.
And the closer they get to the truth, and to each other, the greater the danger becomes.
Given the conspiracy thing, you can expect that there are layers on layers to this story. There’s also a surprising amount of gore and death, so if you’re not into murder, gunfights and the occasional kick boxing session, you’ll want to keep moving here, as there’s all that and more. This is at the adult end of YA for me, somehow contemporary violence touches more of a nerve than the constant death that’s a strong feature of the dystopians I usually tend towards.
Unusually, I felt the romantic attraction built well through the story. I often feel that the feelings are an afterthought in these books, but this is woven throughout and worked really well.
All in all, as should be apparent from the tweet that started this whole review, I *really* enjoyed this. It’s my first encounter with Sarah Alderson – I’ll make sure it’s not my last. Fortunately, there appears to be a back catalogue for me to get my teeth into, so that’s good news too. Just in case I happen to run out of books from my TBR pile. (Although given I won 35 Saint books that arrived this morning, that seems unlikely any time soon 😉 )