Rating: WARTY!
I normally avoid prologues, introductions, prefaces, etc., like the plague, but it's hard to bypass them in an audio book. I only realized I had listened to the prologue when the next thing the narrator announced was "Chapter One". The prologue contained the classic trope of having a character description delivered by way of character Shay Renby looking into a mirror. It's so clichéd and lazy to write that way., and the prologue destroyed any of the tension the novel might have had over the question of whether or not the main character gets away. She does - it's right there in the prologue!
The author does have a bit of an excuse here because this red-headed girl is on the run and is changing her appearance, but still! She has a dog with her which she's also disguising. The weird thing was that chapter one describes the liberation of what is evidently this selfsame dog from an animal experimentation lab, so this was more of an epilogue than a prologue, which was weird. The end of the story arrives before the beginning. You have to have a truly great story to get away with hat, and this one wasn't.
It struck me that chapter one is the real prologue, because it takes place before the actual prologue (how screwed-up is that?!). Chapter one describes some young animal activists breaking into a lab. It's engaging enough, if improbable. The author has them breaking into the facility not so much to free the animals per se, but to unlock all the cages, so the experimental subjects become completely mixed-up and thereby ruin the experiment, so far, so good.
We're told as they first break in, that they have three minutes and fifty seconds, but the first room they enter, where they free rats and mice, would have eaten up nearly all of that time. Despite this, they then enter a second room where they free the macaque monkeys which are apparently undergoing some kind of brain experimentation. Some of the frightened macaques bite. One of the activists gets a cut on her hand from breaking open cages. Apparently this group of activists isn't smart enough to wear gloves or to grasp the essential elements of epidemiology, which I found hard to believe.
They enter an office where they rifle the file cabinets and steal USB drives which have experimental data on them. There's also a fourth room where there's a dog chained up, having evidently had some sort of medical procedure performed on it. One of them frees the dog. Even if we assume that the group splits up and does all of this simultaneously, less than four minutes doesn't seem anywhere near enough time for all of this activity to be completed, but I was willing to let that slide for the sake of a good story. I should have known better!
So the story then became, "What's the deal with this dog, and how did it end up in the company of the red-haired girl?" What we know from the blurb is that Shay's brother, a hacker who goes by "Odin" was the one who took the dog, which is how it ended up in her care, and the corporation, evidently named Singular, wanted it back with a vengeance. Shay is supposed to be more vengeful than Singular ever could be. This is what drew me to this novel. Unfortunately, nothing had happened by the half-way point.
My initial feelings were that the dog has somehow had its smarts amped up. So far so good. This sadly went to hell in a hand-basket when we reached the area around chapter six. From six through ten I was skipping tracks on the audio disks with abandon, because the story had screeched to a dead halt and became boring as hell. Eventually it picked up again, but now I was not inclined favorably towards it as I had been for the first five chapters. The narrator, Tara Sands's voice had become truly irritating, too, and sounded as pedantic as the writing. The voice was way too old for the age of the characters. I couldn't stand to listen to it any more - the narration or the boring story by the half-way point.
On the topic of writing, as I said, it had been fine to begin with, then grew really tedious. One issue I had was that evidently either Sandford or Cook, or both, don't understand that the word 'another' is a conjoining of 'an' with 'other', not a conjoining of 'a' with 'nother', so they wrote "a whole nother" rather than "a whole other". This is a relatively minor point but on top of everything else it was too much.
For me this is fine when it's part of a character's speech, because people really do say things like that, but it's not fine as part of the narration, unless you already set up the narration to be non-standard, or unless it's a first person PoV novel, neither of which holds here. Sometimes I weep for the English language. On the other hand, it's things like this which make English the most bad-ass language on the world!
But here we were, about half way through the novel, and this bad-ass female character we had been promised in the book blurb had failed to materialize. We all know book blurbs lie - that's their job after all - but to misrepresent the book so badly takes some real disrespect for your readers. I know that author's have as little to do with the back cover as they do with the front, so this is on Big Publishing&Trade; (again!), but I would flat ditch a publisher who screwed me over Publishers don't own writers anymore and if we get less than the best, it's time to recognize that, and move on.
Move on is what I did. This story should have been a fast-paced thriller and it was ponderous. It went into early retirement when Shay got to the hotel for the homeless or whatever it was, and never picked up again - at least not by the half-way mark. I was bored to tears and cannot recommend this as a worthy read.
