(3.25 Stars)

What do you do when you are a math geek who is into SciFi, Guns, Books, and Action? You write a book about it, I guess. This book is about Cas Russell, a snarky specialized calculated (and calculating) killing machine. It is part Thriller, part Action, part Sci-Fi, and some super powers thrown in for good measure.

I liked that the characters had distinctive personalities that came through in their dialog, and actions. The story was interesting and reminded me a lot of the television show Alphas. The author does a good job with banter and keeps the story moving along without dull moments of unnecessary backstory. I also like strong female leads.

What kept me from rating this book higher was that a lot of the events just did not add up (no pun intended). Real world consequences did not seem to apply to this story... senseless killings, destruction of property, traffic, even military bases just don't seem to conform to any reality based understanding.

Readers of Charlie Human or Cat Rambo should like this book. There are two more books in this series, which is good if you like this book, because there are a lot of loose ends that were not tied up by the end. ( )

A street mercenary with math superpowers takes a job to rescue a hostage, which leads her into fighting a shadowy conspiracy. I liked how the various characters' powers worked, and there was a lot of good action. The characters themselves were a bit thin and they acted erratically; for example they are pretty casual about killing/robbing innocent bystanders, but then go after the evil conspiracy because what they are doing is "wrong". ( )

Cas Russell is good at what she does: retrieval. She also just so happens to be able to see mathematical equations, which comes in handy for fights in which she can predict the trajectory of a bullet or the angle at which she needs to attack from. When Cas takes a job to retrieve Courtney Polk from a drug cartel and then Courtney disappears, she learns that Dawna, the woman calling herself Courtney's sister, is actually a telepath and manipulates Cas into doing her bidding. And, there's whispers of something called Pithica, a deeply hidden network that may be pulling the strings. Cas is determined to find out more, despite the fact that Rio - a psychopath who's still the closest Cas has to a friend - tells her to stay out of it.

A wild ride of a near-future science fiction thriller. To be honest, it's very light in the science fiction side of that and I probably wouldn't even mention it if it weren't published by Tor. Fast-paced and violent, with not a lot of character development but a compelling enough storyline that I wanted to know what would happen, even if the revelations (what there were of them, as there's clearly some left for sequels) were somewhat predictable. ( )

Writing this review makes me sad. I don't want to be negative anymore. I just want to be happy.

The concepts are much better than the execution. I don't want to call it lazy because it really doesn't seem like its low effort writing but the result still has a lot of the flaws lazy books have too.

The ability of the main character would've been much less annoying to me if I was just magic.
I expect I am in the minority here because not too many people understand physics well enough to even tell how absurd this all is. Furthermore, her ability is only ever a plot device. It never really feels like an actual ability that follows any kind of rules. It can never do what's really needed to resolve a situation that is supposed to be tense but can do basically everything the next moment if it's time to be badass.
Beyond that, the beginning of the book was really well done. While going right into the action is a popular recipe it actually doesn't work for me most of the time but in this case, it was fine.
The initial mystery buildup was very engaging and I was totally on board.

But, while the book never hits rock bottom, it never became as enjoyable as the opening was again.

The book makes an attempt at the legendary moral gray so many books fail at nowadays. And while it's a better attempt than many others I've read it still falls short by quite a margin.

The MC starts out as a total badass with rather questionable morals but then a random guy tells her that what she is doing is really not so nice and she immediately falls into a protracted moral crisis.
From that point onward the MC adapted a lot of classic cheap YA characteristics of coming of age and finding your purpose in the world and questioning and developing your morals and all that. But it's not well done. I didn't have the connection and understanding of the MC to follow this supposed growth. It just felt like the MC was getting younger instead of older. I've seen this quite a bit in more recent books. This is what happens if an author doesn't want to take the time to develop a badass character as well as have some kind of growth. The result typically is a badass character that "grows" backward.
To be fair, it's much less of a problem in this book than in many others I've read with the same issue.

What I've enjoyed is the whole struggle with never really knowing if your mind is really your own. Lots of books do this but very few are actually willing to commit to the consequences. That is probably also the main reason I liked it. Because I so rarely see it done properly.
(But I've read in reviews that the author overdoes this a lot in the next book. Too much of a good thing I guess.)
I was a bit disappointed that we got nothing at all about her past in this book especially because it seems the next book in the series is much worse and I will probably not read it. Very rarely does the second book in a series get lower ratings than the first one. ( )

Zero Sum Game
By S.L. Huang
What an exciting ride! A gal that does fast computations in her head is also a kick a$$ at getting bad guys, or those she thinks are bad guys. But some powerful players after her for her brain but not for her math skills.
This is a fast paced, high action, mystery, with mind control psychics. Extremely believable. Loved it! ( )