Plot or Premise

Colter Shaw has been poking around his father’s death from years ago and the poking has finally turned up some interesting leads as well as some nasty bad guys who would rather he either stop looking or find for them a missing secret cache of something his father hid. While playing cat and mouse, he uses a safe house that his father had set up long ago but finds someone else has been using it recently — Colter’s absent brother.

What I Liked

I had seen the TV episode where Colter reunites with his brother (the show had a different purpose / intent than the book), so I expected it to happen. And while a bit of a cliché for how it happens, it’s cool to see them together, slowly jockeying around to see how they now relate years later. His brother is a bad-ass merc, which comes in handy when the two need some backup against the big bad guys. There are two sub-plots going on simultaneously — one for a big giant plan if someone can find a missing document and one for a larger plan dealing with real-estate and forced ghettoization followed by gentrification. A little more intricate than you expect to see in your average mystery novel. The action that was a little too much in the previous novel is perfectly at home in this one.

What I Didn’t Like

The story bounces around a little too much, and some links to old cases as well as old partners seem a little contrived. Not enough to detract too far, just makes for a pacing problem when the story veers away from the main plot for too long a time occasionally.

The Bottom Line

Have you met my brother?

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

Plot or Premise

A teen wakes up in The Glade, a large field and homestead surrounded by four high walls with doors that open for part of the day, giving entry into a maze filled with untold dangers. This is the first book of the Maze Runner series.

What I Liked

The initial premise is interesting, a micro-society made up of teen boys, with no memory of the past, although many of them remember nicknames. The main character is named Thomas, and he has slightly more memory than the rest. Food and supplies arrive monthly through the same metal elevator that he arrives in, but nobody knows what’s going on. As time progresses, it becomes pretty clear that this is some sort of experiment, although more clear to the reader than the boys in the Glade. Eventually, they have to push the boundaries of the maze and then life starts to get more interesting.

What I Didn’t Like

While the premise is on the same level as The Hunger Games or Divergent, I marked it down a peg because the life they’re leading in the Glade is a little too “pat”. You find out a bit more in book 2, but in book 1, it all seems to run a little too well for a bunch of young teens who have no memory of the past yet somehow maintain a certain level of advanced maturity anyway…farming, treating the sick, dealing with trauma and chaos, etc. It has a bit of a “hey we’re not Lord of the Flies” but with no explanation of how they developed. Plus, it’s hard to believe NOBODY figured stuff out for the Maze before Thomas, yet part of the experiment was to do exactly that…

The Bottom Line

A great start to a great series