Sarah's Library

22/7 - Great plot! Great suspense! I just wish the author hadn't decided to make his POV changes even worse than they were in Game. The changes are lightning fast, leaving the reader with a paragraph or two only, before the story switches from one sibling to the other, and then back again. The switches are very annoying but they definitely achieve their desired outcome (or what I believe was the author's desired outcome) - keeping the suspense level raised and forcing me to read pages, if not chapters more than I had intended when I first picked up the book.

As with Game I'm finding myself drawn to, and more sympathetic towards, Rebecca's POV. HP is continuing to show himself to be a drug-addicted idiot who never learns. You'd think that being used as a patsy for a contract killer's murder would teach him that DRUGS ARE BAD and are only going to get him into more trouble, but no, as soon as he is released from the Saudi prison (where a pair of lawless, ruleless police-types have been waterboarding him for hours, even days) he's looking for his next hit from the bong. He's also still addicted to the Game and the feelings of fame and power he gets from the supposed accolades of playing the Game. Currently can't see a whole lot of redeeming features in HP, I thought I did at the end of the last book, when he fought back and managed to break free of the Game. Unfortunately, it seems he has a seriously addictive-type personality, and so anything that a person could possibly get addicted to he will be addicted to. To be continued...

23/7 - I'm really speeding through this. Due to those annoyingly frequent POV changes the suspense never really dies down, if one sibling's side of the story relents on the tension a little the other keeps dragging you along - for the reader it never really lets go. Late last night I glanced at the clock at one point, thinking "It's getting late, I'll just finish this chapter and then turn out the light.", then I get to the end of the 'chapter' and glance at the clock again (just to see if I can hurry through one more tense chapter), only to find that 45 minutes and the rest of that original chapter plus three extras have gone by without me even realising it (I still managed to squeeze another chapter in before going to sleep).

The description of the business ArgosEye is in is frighteningly believable and disturbing considering the epidemic of trolls we have been experiencing over the last months and years. The thought that there might be a whole company of them working to bury true reviews from real consumers upsets my sense of fair play. In Buzz not only are they working on actual review sites like this one, but also all the social media sites that most of us use. With the type of troll ArgosEye employs we would never know if we were dealing with one, they don't behave in a suspicious manner the way your normal run of the mill GR troll does. They have full online lives, join all the right sites months before making their move on behalf of which ever client hired them to make sure their name is shown in a positive light. They don't all start flame or praise wars, mostly they're a lot less conspicuous, simply writing multiple reviews in favour of their client's products, but not all on the same day the way most of GR's less intelligent trolls do. I wonder if one day that kind of fake review might become illegal and prosecutable in a court of law... To be continued...

24/7 - Yep, finished that last night with ease, even got a decent start on the next book in the pile. This is definitely a middle-of-the-series book, you couldn't read it without having read the first book, and only the most determined of people could read this without going on to the final book - not so much a cliffhanger, more simply a case of nothing being tied up or concluded in any way. In fact Game was less conclusionless, possibly in case it was a one hit wonder, than Buzz.

Buzz didn't focus so much on the game. It was mentioned in reference and as background, but as far as HP knew he wasn't playing the game. Despite the fact that he wasn't receiving missions, or anything else through the phone, both HP and Rebecca still appeared to be dancing to the puppet master's tune, at least they were as far as the italicised conversations that preceded a few of the chapters seemed to show.

The surprise reveal of who was trolling Rebecca was indeed a surprise to me. I had my mind set on one particular character who I was sure Rebecca was discounting as not being guilty way too quickly. I thought this person had a far stronger motive for wanting revenge towards Rebecca than she believed and was already planning how I would write about it without revealing the culprit. So when my suspicions were proven wrong I was quite surprised, in fact my suspected unsub ended up helping Rebecca identify the real bad guy. Oh well, I rarely guess the bad guy in mysteries, so the fact that I was totally off isn't too surprising.

I would highly recommend this, and probably the whole series (although can't guarantee the quality of the third book, not having read it), to anyone who's a fan of other Swedish/Danish crime thrillers.