Claire Chastain has recently moved back to Washington D.C. with her grandmother from New York City. She picks up a data analytics job, does good work, and doesn't make very many friends. After hearing about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of a childhood friend, Claire starts to notice a few things out of place - a Lincoln Continental tailing her to work, a spreadsheet that should have never made its way to her hands, a window open in her basement, mail missing out of her mailbox. It seems she's been thrust into a dangerous game she has no interest in playing, but Claire needs to keep the upper hand in order to make things right and stay alive.
With a premise like that, I should have been hooked from the start, and I was, but it didn't last very long, unfortunately. I'll start off by saying that Claire is an incredibly unlikeable character, from beginning to end. We learn a bit of her background - father ran off, mother died in a car crash, grandmother emotionally and physically abused her when she was young. I suppose it's supposed to make you simpathize with Claire, but her actions and thoughts towards others were occassionally unnecessarily malicious. The story sometimes gives you flashbacks to the past - examples include Claire's childhood and conversations with her grandmother, her job interview at the office in D.C, and the moment she found out about her friend Gavin's death - and a few times I found it a bit difficult to tell the difference between the past and present. There were some definitely fast-paced moments, and I did enjoy how some little tidbits of information mentioned for a split second became very significant later in the novel. I did like how everything came together in the end, but sometimes I felt like any problem encountered was solved with little to no difficulties, which may be due to the length of the novel but it made things feel a bit unrealistic. And if I had to read another character tell someone to "shut up" one more time in the second half of the novel, I might have thrown my book at the wall.
Overall, I'd say this was a pretty average read, and not something I normally would have picked up on my own but I'm still glad I gave it a chance. I might give some of his other work a chance, but for now I'm just happy to have gotten this one out of the way.
With a premise like that, I should have been hooked from the start, and I was, but it didn't last very long, unfortunately. I'll start off by saying that Claire is an incredibly unlikeable character, from beginning to end. We learn a bit of her background - father ran off, mother died in a car crash, grandmother emotionally and physically abused her when she was young. I suppose it's supposed to make you simpathize with Claire, but her actions and thoughts towards others were occassionally unnecessarily malicious. The story sometimes gives you flashbacks to the past - examples include Claire's childhood and conversations with her grandmother, her job interview at the office in D.C, and the moment she found out about her friend Gavin's death - and a few times I found it a bit difficult to tell the difference between the past and present. There were some definitely fast-paced moments, and I did enjoy how some little tidbits of information mentioned for a split second became very significant later in the novel. I did like how everything came together in the end, but sometimes I felt like any problem encountered was solved with little to no difficulties, which may be due to the length of the novel but it made things feel a bit unrealistic. And if I had to read another character tell someone to "shut up" one more time in the second half of the novel, I might have thrown my book at the wall.
Overall, I'd say this was a pretty average read, and not something I normally would have picked up on my own but I'm still glad I gave it a chance. I might give some of his other work a chance, but for now I'm just happy to have gotten this one out of the way.