Tim Hawken

Dystopian fiction is not a genre I’m typically drawn to, but I have never gone wrong reading something written by Tim Hawken. Whether contemporary literature, experimental paranormal YA or this lightning-paced dystopian techno-thriller, Thrill Switch, he always delivers authentically layered and engaging characters and story arcs. He also knows just when to inject some humour to balance the dire.

I love feisty female characters, and Ada Byron is about as tough as they get. Past trauma and show more guilt have sharpened her attitude and bottomed out her trust level, both in people generally and participating in the virtual world. She’s rude, and at times outright crude, but her gutsiness is well-matched with the tough characters and situations she must confront in her hunt for a serial killer. And, yes, I’m sure Hawken’s naming of his Thrill Switch protagonist after the female computing pioneer is no accident… Continue reading review >> https://www.bookloverbookreviews.com/2023/04/thrill-switch-tim-hawken-review.htm... show less

Michael is dead and in Hell. That’s definitely a cause for concern – but Satan is quick to assure Michael that Hell can just be a temporary stop so long as he confronts his sins, deals with them and properly confronts and accepts responsibility for them and he can ascend to Heaven. At least once all of his sins are discovered and he gets all his memories back

But when he does, he finds it’s not redemption he wants – but revenge against those who hurt the woman he loved. And Satan is show more more than willing to help him with that – because Michael is the key to getting what he wants, final revenge against god.

This book is that rarest of gems – completely original. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that was quite like this. While I’m normally reading trope after trope after trope, this book was a refreshing new story that I’ve never seen before.

Part of the problem with this is I can’t truly describe why it’s new or original without giving away some pretty huge spoilers. The ending completely overturns everything I thought was coming, it’s the ultimate twist and turned me from being quite interested in the next book, to being utterly fascinated and desperate to see where it is going. I really can’t explain enough how epic and world turning the whole twist was and how it cast everything into such a radically different light. It was a perfect surprise and took an already original book to the next level.

The setting itself is an interesting one – hell, the afterlife Hell, ruled by Satan where souls go not to be punished but to be redeemed. They go to relive their sins, to feel epic, incredible guilt for those sins until they come to terms with them, root the core of them out of themselves and are then worthy to enter Heaven. It’s less a punishment, and more a cleansing to ensure that Heaven is not polluted with sin. Michael enters Hell after death, with no memory of who he is or what happened and is given a guided tour by Satan himself – learning how things work, seeing the many sights and hearing the origin of demons – people that have come to embody their sins. The exploration doesn’t just reveal Hell but also Michael himself as his memories return with each wave of guilt, revealing more of the fascinating story.

But there’s also a lot of fore shadowing for more – increasingly as the book goes on its apparent that some of the sins are not quite what they seem. To begin with I considered this a failing of the book – I have early notes expressing my disapproval of Michael‘s “lazy” life, motivated by fear, after he went through something traumatic was truly the sin of “sloth” so much as it was evidence of deep trauma. I was about to note in the review at the terrible treatment of mental illness with this and the suicides – but as the book progresses it becomes apparent that the failings are part of Hell. That the system isn’t quite as clear cut as we see – and this progresses with ever growing foreshadowing of how the whole system is not nearly as neat or obvious as it first appears. Again, I can’t talk about this without spoiling the book except to say the hints keep coming but the ending is still a shock.

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In my SPSFC3 reading, I've come across a few books that felt like they could easily be movies: this is one of them. It's fast paced and has a similar tone to a big summer blockbuster action movie. However, this one would probably be rated R or even NC-17, depending on how much the director chose to show... see the CWs I listed below for why. Even with those CWs, though, this isn't a horror story. It's firmly a science fiction thriller.

Our main character Ada is a cop in her mid-to-late-20s, show more and she hasn't been into the Holos (aka the virtual world) since her first trip... which is when her father was killed by a serial killer. So naturally, this book's murder case requires her to go back into the Holos for the first time in years. I really enjoyed watching her experience it all essentially for the first time.

I think my favorite characters, though, were the ones who spent a lot of time in the Holos. Joon and Sabi in particular were favorites of mine. I really felt like they captured some of the identity and self-creation themes presented in this book. As you can probably guess, that was my favorite part of the book's plot, too. I really enjoyed following where the psychological aspect of the plot went.

No content warnings were provided for this book that I saw, but I really think they were needed. There were times I felt like the book got much more intense than it had forecast at the start of the book. I am a big supporter of CWs, so I would always rather have them provided.

Additionally, the book does end on a slightly unfulfilling note. There is a nice resolution to the book-specific story, and theoretically this could be read as a standalone book with a slightly off-balance ending. However, while not really ending on a cliffhanger exactly, it is perfectly clear that there is more of this story yet to come.

I guess a quick summary of my experience with this book is this: I enjoyed the plot and pacing a lot, and the characters grew on me quickly. The messaging in a lot of this book was fascinating. The darker themes in the story resulted in me getting thrown out of the flow, though. I would have enjoyed the philosophical aspect and the way the book pushed the boundaries of reality a lot more had the dark scenes not been as intense as they often were.

CWs: death, gore, torture, violence, attempted sexual assault

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I read this book as part of the judging process for the 3rd Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC3), and I was provided a review copy for judging purposes. My opinions are my own and do not reflect the thoughts of my SPSFC3 team or the competition as a whole. show less

I am one of the judges of the SPSFC3 contest participating for team Space Girls and this is the penultimate finalist book left to read & review. This review is 100% my own personal opinion and my score will be tallied with the other judges to determine the winner.

I heard fabulous comments about this book. This might have skewed my expectations a bit since the people that have told me how great this book is posess very similar scoring tastes as myself. So, I was coming into this book with show more insanely high expectations it would be mindblowing.

There is quite a nice a mesh of genres in this book that will grant it offers wide genre appeal: a bit of cyberpunk, dabbles of some aspects of LitRPG where you can get more powerful weapons/avatars and VR death can be real, thriller, political fiction and also dystopia. The beginning of the book is surprisingly similar to that Jennifer Lopez movie 'The cell'.

Taking place around 30 years into the future, a VR reality world is now very popular, inexpensive to log in and with wide adoption in the US to help curb the housing crisis for the impoverished. Now that fewer people are walking outside, there is less physical world consumerism, and less pollution. The book never addresses if technology has advanced enough so that this highly realistic VR world consumes less water for cooling servers. It seems rather odd one of the mecca VR capitals of the world would be Las Vegas. Quite frankly, I would have assumed it would make more sense to select a place with tons of water like Detroit or a small town next to Niagara Falls.

Still, it was somewhat refreshing to have a book take place in Las Vegas.

The first chapter starts with a bang (pun intended). A long-term VR user named Christos Rama is being tortured in a room that suspiciously looks identical to the revamped abandoned casino where his real body is jacked up. Despite every attempt to escape, a serial killer still finds him...

The Las Vegas PD is tasked to solve this guy's murder and suspect it might be the doing of an infamous serial killer named Jazlin Switch (whose mind is supposed to be trapped in a firewall after somehow being captured in the VR world). In a nutshell, the book starts really good and the action is quite thrilling.

Now, this is where the book has issues that start to pile up. Even though it makes a ton of sense to ask a woman named Ada Byron with a PhD in serial killers to assist with the case since she is supposed to have a ton of knowledge about Jazlin (and a good motive why she hates that killer so much), there is a major issue here. Ada is not just some clinical psychologist/outsider consultant or a rookie cop that just casually knows by instinct how to work like a detective, she is supposed to be a detective.

Which by itself, is not an issue either. I have read plenty of books starring female detectives. The problem is Ada has absolutely zero experience using the VR world. Which seems really odd given detectives would need to solve criminal cases by knowing how to hack into crypto coin accounts under false identities. There is also a high likelihood that informants and middlemen would do a lot of shady deals online in firewalled special rooms. While the reason why Ada hates the VR world is 100% justified, I think the book could have handlled things better by either making her an outsider consultant that tags along or having her still show immense disdain for the VR world, but still sufficiently knowledgeable about entering it on limited occasion with a really crummy avatar persona without any special specs just to pass her detective test.

Either option could have worked in the story, obviously with several cons. If she is an outsider, then you'd need a third character as acting cop since Min-Joon is himself an external FBI agent specializing in VR world crime. Having more POVs makes it harder to write the book, but it might have offered better breadcrumbs to make the reader guess which of the 3 characters are a bad guy in disguise. I would have enjoyed guessing the red herrings a bit more.

If Ada was a cop that did know a little bit of the VR world, then the generic police Avatar sections of the book would have to be rewritten. I quite personally think the book would have shined better with either option, the second story structure change scenario would have been a plus for me because Ada is so greeny green, that it is difficult for me to take her seriously as a detective in a major life-changing criminal case.

Min-Joon as her unwanted teammate is a fabulous character. Loved the chapter where he explains to Ada why he spent so much time in the VR world and does touch on the reader's heart strings regarding the utter care he places in his VR alter persona.

I also liked Seargent Mendez. Now, I bet everyone who has followed my reviews would like to know my verdict about the snippets of Spanish dabbled in the book. And apparently the author tasked a person to check the Spanish instead of relying on an unreliator robotranslator. Which is definitely a wise choice. As for the Spanish, I am wondering whether it was accidental or a purposeful writing choice to have Mendez make so many grammatical Spanish mistakes.

The book never specifies if Mendez is a 3rd or 4th generation Mexican and her mastery level of the language. The spelling of some phrases seems to hint Mendez's ancestors emigrated no later than around 2010. It isn't that some of the slang words are wrongly spelled, just that Spanish is an ever evolving language and the umlaut ü symbol is vanishing from Mexican Spanish. Words that stubbornly cling to the symbol like pingüino are starting to vanish. You'll see the word now pretty equally divided in modern everyday Spanish using a normal u. I recall schools these days are ditching the Ch and Ll letters of the alphabet for simplicity as well.

One scene particulaly stroke me to feel Mendez has a B1-B2 level of Spanish in the scene where she affirms to Ada whether she understood her command. Mendez uses the word 'Entendida?', which at first sight seemed to hint she was referring to the English word 'Understood?'. So, in retrospect, I did understand the phrase. Only that... this is a grammatical mistake in Spanish. Yes, the verb entender does have a tense that roughly translates to the English equivalent verb understood. But as far as I know, it is never used in this very specific context. I probably learned this grammar rule in school growing up, but I can't remember which obscure verb conjugation rule it is. Even though Spanish is my L2 language and there's aspects of the language I'll never master (such as the joy of abureating), I picked up verb conjugating rules very well and don't even know why I select the right verb, it just comes out naturally.

So, when I saw that very specific sentence in the book, I knew in an instant if Mendez had advanced Spanish, she would have ordered Ada with the phrase: ¿Entendiste?, which roughly translates to 'Did you understand?' Once again, I can't recall the obscure grammar rule why Understood doesn't directly translate like that to Spanish, perhaps it is an irregular idiom that just became widely adopted and any native speaker accepts the idiom as it is without really pondering why this is so. But, since I know plenty of people love it how I analyze Spanish snippets in books, I couldn't disappoint them. Maybe Mendez really only speaks colloquial Spanish passingly with her grandparents and the author hid this as an Easter egg in the hopes a reader that frets over minutiae like this as me would successfully spot it. Either way, it doesn't make or break the book for me, Mendez is a fun side character.

As for the villains, I liked Jazlin, her scenes were always great. Most of the other villains however are so cartoony that I sometimes wondered if this book was in reality a parody. I also felt surprised the government didn't put a security stop on companies making VR devices, because even a non syncing one can make your heart stop. Like... if you flatline, that is uhhh. real clinical death. It isn't just a Ventricular Fibrillation that can be zapped with an AED within a few seconds, PEAs and asystole needs CPR and adrenaline. Man, I am surprised these companies haven't been sued to death for causing permanent brain damage to flatlined users.

There are also other issues in the book such as how come criminals don't disguise themselves as the IV fluid delivery guy and just enters people's apartments and steal copper cables or hack into their machines to steal SureCoins. I would have assumed Ada as a detective would be an ace spotting these criminals because it would be so common to see them sneaking into homes and looting them. She wouldn't have ever needed to enter the VR world if she specialized in this kind of theft.

Anyhow, these are the issues I had with the book. However, the story is very fun, I enjoyed the writer's style and the plot holes don't entirely distract from an otherwise entertaining book. Enjoy! show less