Plot or Premise

Colter Shaw describes himself as a rewardist — one who seeks rewards that are offered for finding people, things, etc. He only gets paid if he is successful, and he doesn’t go after criminals for law enforcement; he’s not a bounty hunter. He likes the puzzle-solving aspect, and in this book, he is looking for a missing girl in Silicon Valley.

What I Liked

I tumbled on to the series of books from a new TV series called Tracker, starring Justin Hartley (aka Oliver Queen from the Smallville series). Sometimes, he simply tracks people lost in the woods; others get into trouble and need someone to help extricate them from a situation.

I really liked the premise of Colter, aka a Western, riding into town, solving a problem, and riding off into the sunset, which is not dissimilar from the Reacher series by Lee Child. The background is that Colter grew up on a compound as the son of a former professor turned semi-paranoid survivalist. The two parents, plus two sons and a daughter, grew up relatively off-the-grid with lots of tests of how to survive on their own. As an adult, Colter drives around in an RV and helps people who offer rewards, although he’s often more interested in the puzzle than the money.

In this first official novel (there’s an earlier short story), Colter responds to a father living in Silicon Valley whose daughter has gone missing. The tale eventually grows with video game bigwigs, CEOs, thugs, many techno issues, and many odd IT specialists who might be involved. The book ramps up the action throughout, with more people going missing and a puzzle modelled after an escape-based RPG action game.

A cute twist added at the end reflects Colter’s financial situation (he is relatively wealthy and hence can afford to roam the country doing low-paying work).

What I Didn’t Like

A popular plot device is to start a novel in the middle of some large action scene and then rewind to the story’s beginning to show how the characters got there. The downside to this approach for the current book is that there are about four other scenes before that in the story where you know that they’re not really that significant because they don’t involve the same scenario from the big ending. For example, he goes to rescue a guy, and it COULD be the end of the story, except we already know that the final scene is about him rescuing a woman, so it isn’t that tense.

On a related note, the pacing was off. The mid-parts of the book lagged, partly because of the lack of tension and partly because there were just too many red herrings. One of the characters appears almost like some mystical IT Jedi, half Elon Musk, half cult leader. Very odd.

Lastly, there is a larger mystery that Colter is working on related to his father, who died 15 years before, and whether it was an accident or murder, and if he was murdered, was it by his brother or persons unknown? Unfortunately, Colter keeps jumping in and out of the longer story, and each time, the main story grinds to a halt.

The Bottom Line

Love the character, but uneven storyline and pacing