Friday, April 28, 2017

Collective Reading Updates: Don't Look Away

Don't Look Away

by Leslie A. Kelly
Book 1 of Veronica Sloan

~ Goodreads ~

The most recent updates will be added to the top each re-post.

As I progress through the book and find reasons to update, more events may or may not be revealed.
Review for Don't Look Away | link coming soon



Progress on 04/28/16:  55 of 323 pages (17%)

For a crime thriller/romantic suspense, this book is actually moving along a bit slowly, and we're spending a lot more time dealing with political gesturing.

Anyway, the whole O.E.P.I.S. thing kind of fascinates me, but at the same time, I found myself wondering about how invasive this kind of technology is since it literally records everything the individual with the O.E.P. device installed sees.

Case in point:
If he had been having any sort of inappropriate relationship with the victim, the downloaded images from her optic chip would certainly reveal it.  Ronnie hoped it wasn't the case.  She truly didn't want to see pictures of the Polo-League dude doing it.  Especially not through the eyes of the woman being done.  Talk about voyeurism to the extreme.

Um... I know I read a lot of erotica and erotica-lite, but I'm not sure I'd want to be in Veronica's place when she goes through other people's O.E.P. downloads.  She'd mentioned something about the death row inmates who volunteered to be experimented on with this technology, and how during her training with these inmates, they'd purposefully recorded themselves doing outrageous things of which she had observe.

I still don't know how she is to extract recordings straight from another person's O.E.P. device, so I hope it gets explained soon.  So let's find that head, ASAP!

Anyway, at this point in the book, I'm seeing a few logic holes here and there about this new technology that are hopefully either explained, or mentioned.  I'm glad that others have already mentioned the one biggest flaw of the O.E.P. device is that, at the time of murder, there's no way the victim would have been able to download the recorded images into a computer.  And if someone was willing to go as far as murder, and knew that the victim had an O.E.P. device installed, what's to stop the killer from removing and disposing of the head... as gruesome as that sounds.

Obviously that is what happened here, even though we find out that the removal of the victim's head wasn't because of the O.E.P. device, but for some other reason.

Still...



Progress on 04/27/16:  34 of 323 pages (12%)

Okay... the first sentence of this book makes so much more sense now, aside from just being shockingly gruesome as a story opener.

So, apparently this book takes place in the year 2022 (which is how the book opens anyway with a location and time marker, so I don't know why I'm surprised).  There is new technology created that involves embedding a camera into an individual's head, that is connected to that person's optical nerve, and at least 5000 individuals were selected for this program, especially law enforcement officers.  And apparently our MC Veronica Sloan was one of these individuals.

This technology was taken by the government as an experiment in criminal investigation, as 500 of the 5000 individuals are from law enforcement agencies, all of them forming the Optical Evidence Program Investigative Squad, O.E.P.I.S.  And depending upon the success of this new investigative approach, the plan is to plant at least one or two law enforcement officers with O.E.P. technology in every law enforcement agency throughout the nation.

The idea is that these individuals would record all the goings-on in their day through sight, though this information must be downloaded regularly into files.  Although this feels like an immense breach in personal privacy--because, how do keep from recording more intimate, persona, private moments in your day?--the book DOES explain away the ethical complications using a big tragedy of terrorism that happened five years prior to this story's time setting.  And this is essentially how a lot of dystopian books explain away or justify their story's government making these kinds of rulings that affect the personal freedoms of their people.

While the book doesn't state it straight-out, I think the story leans toward dystopian-lite... or something.

Now, how Veronica, or even anyone from O.E.P.I.S. are supposed to be crucial to solving murders of other individuals with this kind of technology embedded in their brains is still a little confusing to me.  According to the book, so far, the images recorded by the O.E.P. device must be downloaded onto a computer before anyone else can access it.  But the book is implying that other people with an installed O.E.P. device are able to access those images directly through another individual with an O.E.P. device?

Because, obviously when our victim died, she was unable to download those last recorded moments of her life as she was being murdered.

And now her head is missing from the crime scene, so we've got our first big dilemma pertaining to this technology.

Honestly, there's so much going on in these first couple chapters right now that I'm having a little bit of difficulty keeping up, but hopefully things will fall into place soon.




Progress on 04/26/16:  3 of 323 pages (1%)

First sentence of the book:
Leanne Carr tried to keep her eyes open through her murder.


***

Booklikes-opoly

Roll #4: (See Also: Fourth Roll Activities)
The MC, Veronica Sloan is a police detective.

Page Count:  323
Cash Award:  +$3.00

Bank Balance:  $30.00 upon completion of this read

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