The Ink Black Heart

I really did try to like this book by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the 6th book in her "Cormoran Strike" series. I read 300 pages (of the total 1,012) and then gave up. The plot revolves around the anonymous and often poisonous internet posts to be found in games and chat rooms. The plot is this: Two twenty-ish people, Edie Ledwell and her often stoned partner, Josh Blay, create a comic strip in which the characters are all intermittently released from their graves at Highgate Cemetary in London. The main character is the heart of an evil man, Hearty. The comic becomes so popular on YouTube that Netflix is now interested in making it into a movie. Meanwhile, persons unknown have taken the characters and setting as a jumping off point for an online game, Drek's Game. The problem is that, one of the primaries, known online as Anomie, has taken a serious dislike to Edie and constantly spreads rumors and innuendo based on too much personal information about Edie, who at one point becomes suicidal as a consequence. Robin Ellacot, Cormoran's partner in their detective business, is in the office one day when Edie comes in asking them to find out who Anomie is. Robin turns her down because the firm has too many active cases and because cyber-sleuthing is not really in their bailiwick. The ground shifts when, a few days later, Robin reads about Edie and Josh being tasered and stabbed in Highgate cemetary. Edie is dead and Josh is critically injured. Edie's agent and the producer from the would-be film ask Edie and Cormoran to find the killer.

Aside from the length of the book, which in and off itself would not deter me, I was exhausted by trying to keep track of the players in the game with names like Worm28, Hartella, Fiendy1, who are known only through their chat entries in the game. It was just too hard for me to feel any connection because I didn't know who they were, what their relationships were to one another, and the constant use of slang and acronyms. Plus, I just didn't like ANY of them very much. 

The LA Times agreed with some of my sentiments, saying "at least 500 pages longer than the story warrants. Far too many of those pages are filled with tweets; characters discussing those tweets; transcripts of website interviews; and gamer group chats complete with all the concurrent private chats they spawn...These last are presented in column form; they are challenging to read and involve a mix/match game of characters, pseudonyms and red herrings that would give Agatha Christie a heart attack." They go on to disagree with some critics: "readers, critics and scholars often try to find the nature of the artist through the art. It is not fair, however, to invent a revelation where one does not exist....the critics she roused now parse her work for transphobia....but more than anything, the book feels like an attempt to take on the digital world and all the pleasure/peril of engaging with people you do not actually know in ways that are often not at all sincere."

I am also in agreement with Kirkus' review which calls the book "an overblown whodunit" that is "long, loose, and lax." They then conclude, "Who did the dastardly deed? After a thousand pages of this, the reader is likely to no longer care." Rolling Stone and other British publications assert that the book's plot is taken from Rowling's own experience with internet bullying, although she said she wrote the book before any of that happened to her. The magazine remarks that "The book takes a clear aim at “social justice warriors” and suggests that Ledwell was a victim of a masterfully plotted, politically fueled hate campaign against her. "

The Never Game

I have read several of  Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme thrillers in the past. This is the launch of a new series starring protagonist Colter Shaw, a largely itinerant single man who chases rewards for lost family members. He is not a bounty hunter and not interested in chasing down criminals, just in finding people whose family members want them found. He makes no guarantees about returning them if they don't want to come back. He was raised by two highly educated parents who at some point abandoned their regular lives and chose to live off the grid in California, home schooling Colter, his older brother Russell and younger sister Dorion. They learned survival skills, including, after their father became dangerously paranoid, how to survive their father, Ashton. Russell had already left home but came back to look after his siblings when their mother had to go help a sick sister and was afraid to leave them with their father. Shortly afterward, Ashton was found dead. Colter is an extraordinary tracker, able to follow the tiniest of signs to find his quarry, and yet he has never been able to find his brother since then and fears that Russell had returned and killed Ashton; but new clues have come to light suggesting there was a real danger to Ashton from outside forces. That storyline runs in the background as Colter is pursuing his most recent case, a missing college student in Silicon Valley. Because of her age, the police are not much interested in the father's claim that she would not just run away or disappear.  It takes Colter less than a day to find evidence indicating that the young woman was kidnapped, but the local detective isn't interested in Colter's theory or evidence. So Colter, while trying to sideline an ex-boyfriend who wants to help, goes looking and finds her. She was being held in an empty warehouse and left with 5 objects to help her possible escape before the kidnapper returned to kill her. With the help of an attractive professional gamer, Colter determines that the clues correspond to a popular online game called The Whispering Man. After a second kidnapping that ends in the death of the victim, Colter tries to figure out why someone would use the game to kidnap and harm people. There are a lot of red herrings, but Colter's success in finding the first two victims gains him credibility with a different detective when a 3rd victim is kidnapped. There is a fair amount of time jumping between Colter's early life and the time when Colter got involved in the case and the current situation where he is trying to rescue the 3rd victim, but you'll be able to follow and unable to put this down and you get drawn into the elaborate plot. There's a short review in The Guardian, a rave in Publishers Weekly, and a balanced hearing from Kirkus.

Ready Player One

If you are a fan of video games or the 80's culture in ANY form, this book will have great appeal. Written by Ernest Cline, this inaugural effort is set in a not-too-distant dystopic future, starting in the outskirts of Oklahoma City--of all places; that's where I grew up. Massive numbers of people are poor, jobless, prospect-less, and living in "stacks" which are these huge metal grid structures with every manner of RV and trailer slotted into often 20+ story high-rises. Many people escape the ugly reality by spending time in The Oasis, an elaborate online virtual world freely available to anyone with internet access. Seventeen-year old Wade Watts also attends school there, and when he is not in "school" he is playing games, hanging out in best friend Aech's chat room, or monitoring the blog of his fantasy girl, Artemis. But the creator of the Oasis has died and left his fortune to whoever can solve a series of puzzles which involve finding keys and then opening gates. Knowledge and skill are required and Wade is one among millions who intend to get to the prize first. A mega-corporation that wants to commercialize The Oasis has also hired hundreds of people to try and solve the puzzle and they have enormous advantages, both technology and money wise. Years have passed without anyone finding the first key, and then Wade does. The lengths to which the corporation will go to win include murdering the leading competitors, and as Wade (aka Parzival), Aech and Artemis learn, they may have to abandon their lone wolf approaches to survive. Read this book for my SF-Fantasy book group and thoroughly enjoyed it. The good guys (and gals) win in the end. There are more detailed plot descriptions in  reviews from the New York Times and Booklist and Powell's.