16th November 2024

I’ve put off reading this second book for some years, based on a memory of finding the first a bit of a slog. But my experience her was better than I was expecting.

Things have settled back to a new normal for Teagan and team after the events of the first book, until LA is hit by massive earthquakes, which naturally cause a lot of drama.

This is balanced by it being a massive thriller full of action and violence punctuated by slow bits and clever bits. There’s a lot of time spent in characters’ heads too, which actually makes for quite a varied diet over all.

I found the first half a bit of a struggle still. There are a lot of words it feels in some places that my eyes skim past and I have to force them back to. But after the first 40% maybe, and aided by a bunch of train journeys, I got into the pace of the story and raced through the rest.

Definitely better than I was worrying about, and gives me confidence that when I get around to choosing book three from the shelf, I’ll be okay there too.

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24th July 2020

I’ll admit that a great deal of what attracted me to this book when I saw it for sale was the title. Typically novels can only get away with titles like this if the publisher really believes in the author, and so it felt like a strong bet.

The idea seems straightforward - there’s a woman who has psychokinetic abilities, she works for the US government doing secret missions. But it all becomes more complex as we discover some more of the backstory, and things of course start to go wrong, because otherwise this wouldn’t be a novel.

I found the first half of the story fairly slow going. It’s slightly odd in that the chapters felt cliffhangery in their endings, and yet my instinct at the end of each chapter was to put the book down and do something else. To be fair to this book, it’s not the only one thats had that effect, so it’s possibly more to do with lockdown than the content.

The second half however I raced through, eyes wide in slight horror as I learnt more and more. There are definitely some uncomfortable moments as the plot develops which I felt awkward reading.

Overall, it was okay - good enough that I’ll look out for the sequel when I’m next able to wander around bookshops.

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