Thoughts: Don't Ever Stop

Don't Ever Stop

by Leslie A. Kelly
Book 2 of Veronica Sloan

~ Goodreads ~

Rating:  3.0 Stars

In the months since working on their first murder involving the Optical Evidence Program, Detective Veronica Sloan and Special Agent Jeremy Sykes have been trying to solve the rest of the puzzling case.  That becomes even more imperative when Veronica receives data from a test subject... who sends her the images of a brutal murder he committed.

It’s a race against time as the taunting clues come in.  Ronnie and Sykes find themselves traveling across the country, always one step behind the killer who is zeroing in on his real target...in the nation’s capital.  It will take all of Ronnie’s ingenuity and every bit of her courage to not only solve this crime, but the one that’s haunted her for months.

Especially because, this time, she’s the target of a killer’s brutal rage.

The second (and possibly final?) book of the Veronica Sloan duology was just as fast-paced and exciting as the first.  Don't Ever Stop turns the murder mystery around this time, and rather than seeing the crime committed via the victims' eyes, now the killer has sent his own O.E.P. photo files, showing our detective the murder he committed.

A lot actually goes on in this book, picking up where it left off with an unsolved murder case from Don't Look Away, while giving us a whole new murder mystery to follow.  And it isn't until the end that all the loose ends start tying together, in an actually quite clever way.  It took a little while, but I DID manage to figure out the ongoing mystery lurking in the background of this second book's main conflict.  Surprising twist, yes, but pretty well-outlined, truth be told.

I guess what bugged me the most about this book (and even the previous) was the lukewarm romance.  It lacked chemistry, even if Veronica and Jeremy were two mature adults with great teamwork skills, witty banter, and an angst-less relationship.  They were a wonderfully perfect couple... they just lacked chemistry, whether in bed or out of it.

And then there was a triangle between them and Veronica's PD partner, Mark Daniels.  I found it quite unnecessary, and while it was pretty subtle in the first book, handled well, I thought it just needed to be laid to rest at the end of the first book.  Bringing the situation back again in this second book felt like a deliberate attempt to create conflict, and, once again, unnecessary.  Especially since nothing really came out of it that was significant to either the plot or the character interactions, or even the romance.

While the main criminal mystery in Don't Ever Stop was well executed, the ongoing background mystery felt a little detached.  And also too open-ended for my liking.  Sure the mystery was solved, and a lot of secrets got revealed.  The resolution was depressing, and at the same time, it felt unfinished.

It makes me wonder: Is there going to be another book?  Or is this it and we're going to leave it at that?

Because while there is obviously potential for another book, I'm not sure I know how the rest of the series would proceed from here on out.  Maybe things will become more chaotic and Leslie Kelly will try her hand at a dystopian.  Who knows?

I mean, we've got mad scientist experiments gone wrong, uber government restrictions, and now the creators of the most advanced technology in this world are both dead, with a lot of beta-testing yet to be completed.  It reeks of possible "world spiraling out of control into another trendy dystopian trilogy."

Overall, enjoyable and entertaining.  Just not what I'd expected from Kelly after other books I've read by her.


***

Booklikes-opoly

Roll #18:
MC is a police detective.

Page Count:  281
Cash Award:  +$3.00

Updated Bank Balance:  $79.00

Brief Thoughts: Don't Look Away

Don't Look Away

by Leslie A. Kelly
Book 1 of Veronica Sloan

~ Goodreads ~

Rating:  3.5 Stars

CAN A MURDER VICTIM'S OWN MEMORIES BE USED TO SOLVE A CRIME?

Detective Veronica Sloan isn't shocked by much.  Having lived through the worst terrorist attacks in history — which destroyed much of Washington, D.C. — she's immune to even the most vicious brutality.  But even she is stunned by the discovery of a murder in the basement of the under-reconstruction White House.

Sloan and FBI Agent Jeremy Sykes have been assigned to investigate the homicide because the victim was a participant in a top-secret experiment.  Veronica has been training for just this kind of case, waiting to use her special skills, anxious to learn if a recording device implanted in a victim's head can help solve their murder … before the killer strikes again.

Barring all the typos I stumbled across, and the slow start, this book got interesting as it progressed.  Being a more futuristic type of book, even if it's set only a few years in the future, it was kind of hard to pick up on all the new lingo and all the "history" of the present timeline.

Veronica was not an easy character to relate to, and sometimes came off extremely judgmental; but then she'd correct herself by revisiting earlier snap judgments she makes about people, and properly accept that she was wrong.  I don't know what to think about her.

And then we even have a sort of love triangle--I don't like love triangles.  And in this case, I think it would have been handled well if there had been better chemistry between the respective points involved.  At least Veronica points out the obvious, resenting the fact that they are in the middle of a murder investigation, a rather cruel and gruesome one at that, and the two men around her are too busy posturing and trying to pee their territory around her.

Anyway, I wasn't really all that impressed by the O.E.P. technology that was presented in this book.  The hype and the curiosity that came about made me think that there was a lot more to the optical tech than we actually ended up finding.  In the end, it was all just a fancy, more glamorized kind of body cam that really only snaps non-motion pictures once every second.

While that DOES make for a nice way to watch a crime happening from a victim's perspective, as we can see, there are loopholes and workarounds.  If the perpetrator knows that the O.E.P. technology exists and has been implanted in the victim, said perpetrator can take many precautions to ensure that he or she can still get away with the crime.  Simply remove the head and hide it, or bash in the skull and completely ruin the optical chip, or just wear a mask or find some way to blind the victim.

Truthfully, I was actually expecting something a bit more advanced and... well, fancier.

Time to adjust my mindset, I suppose.

Though at the very least, the criminal investigation wasn't bad, though I would have liked to see more of it.  While our two main characters spend their time looking at photos from their victims' O.E.P. files, a lot of the actual investigating happens behind the scenes, conducted by Veronica's police detective partner.  And while the main culprit wasn't really predictable, the way some of the events in the story progression occurs was predictable.

Finally, this book kind of ends on a cliff-hanger, which means I need to pick up the second book ASAP.  I don't like cliff-hangers.


***

Booklikes-opoly

Roll #4:
Our MC, Veronica, is a police detective.

Page Count:  323
Cash Award:  +$3.00

Updated Bank Balance:  $30.00

See Also: Fourth Roll Activities

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

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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...

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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.

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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