Marc Wayne

Angela works for C4U, a company that provides people who are blind with a live assistant, who remotely sees and hears what the client "sees" and hears through a set of goggles with microphone and speaker the client wears. One client, Claire, uses Angela to help her read books to her daughter, Lily. While working with the mother and daughter one evening, Angela witnesses the brutal murder of Claire by a red-headed assassin.

JT is the co-developer of a teleportation device, and his company QuantiPort is getting ready for their IPO. In college, he had introduced his long-time friend Claire to his friend and future business partner, Dave Benson, and they had fallen in love and started a family. As one of Angela's clients, he uses her service to help him read facial expressions of other people during business meetings. We meet JT right after he finds out that Claire was brutally murdered.

That same day, JT wore his C4U goggles during a meeting at his office while Angela talked to him from her home through the microphone in his ear. After the meeting, they were chatting and realized that they both knew Claire and began discussing the tragedy. Suddenly, Angela sees the red-headed murderer approaching JT. She tells him to run and helps him escape by telling him where to go and what to avoid.

Thus begins Angela and JT's hunt for who is behind the murder of Claire and attempted murder of JT, while trying to stay alive long enough to bring them to justice. There are too many suspects: the religious zealots protesting the new teleportation technology, the new security chief at QuantiPort who has connections with the local police, the venture capitalist who might want more than her share of the pie, competitive companies who want to steal the technology, the director of Claire and JT's foundation for blind children, or even JT's partner Dave.

This near-future mystery is filled with references to science fiction and science possibilities, making it fun for fans of Star Trek. Angela has a mysterious background that we only get to peak at, but that means she has hidden skills to combine with JT's technical background and ability to navigate in the dark. Together they make a good team, but being amateur detectives, they make mistakes, adding to the tension of the story.

I dove into this book, reading it in just a few days. The mystery was intriguing, but the story dragged a little about a third of the way in before picking up again. Since the action focuses on Angela and JT, we get to know the two of them well, but we only learn about the other characters through their filter. Focusing on just these two characters made the story seem a little claustrophobic, and I worried a lot about whether one or both were unreliable narrators, but that added to the suspense. The mystery is resolved and somewhat satisfactorily, but I felt the end of the book was a little abrupt. In the afterword, Wayne mentions the possibility of a sequel, and I would welcome one if it featured both Angela and JT, because I thought their unique talents made for an interesting crime-solving duo.… (more)

Angela witnesses the murder of a blind client via video feed, then spots the murderer via the video feed of JT, another blind client, and helps him escape. Angela and JT then work together to figure out what is happening, who is involved, and why. The story is filled with action and suspense, with our heroes eluding the bad guys and gathering information to identify the real culprit.

The small amount of advanced technology in the story is similar to existing technology, and the one futuristic element is barely enough to label the story as “science fiction”; it’s really more of a mystery/thriller. The character of Angela is well-developed and revealed more fully through a series of flashbacks; JT’s character is more superficial, but he does experience some development by the end of the book.

The story is more focused on action than on rational deduction, as the protagonists bounce around from suspect to suspect, getting into and out of dangerous situations. I found the ending a little disappointing but will not elaborate too much to avoid spoilers; suffice it to say that the author appeared to be setting up a sequel, although this book does stand on its own.

I received a copy of the book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.… (more)

It’s not clear why the author chose to position this book as science fiction. Yes, it involves a tech company that has developed a teleportation device, but any present-day tech development—some new AI app or hot new social media platform—would have served the plot just as well.

It’s really just a murder mystery about the CEO of a tech company, JT, whose partner’s wife has been killed. It seems the killer may be after JT as well. But there are far too many extraneous characters and details that want to serve as red herrings but are really just cul de sacs that go nowhere. For instance, when our pair of protagonists are afraid the city cops may be in on the plot, much is made of getting a hold of JT’s state cop friend. But when they do, he gives a couple of sentences of advice, says he’ll look into a couple of things, and then is never heard from again. Or the guy who ran a camp that JT attended as a kid, who JT has hired to work for his charitable foundation, but who hates him for mysterious reasons—he’s gone by the end of the chapter and never heard from again, just one of many vague suspects tossed into the mix for no useful purpose. Characters are introduced, backgrounds hinted at but never fully clarified, and then they’re gone.

And there’s an almost literal deus ex machina at the end: an old military associate who turns up with night vision goggles and a rifle, saves our protagonists from getting shot, and then disappears into the night.

Our other protagonist is Angela, who witnesses the original murder and for implausible reasons becomes involved in the action. She is a recovering alcoholic with PTSD. We discover the source of her PTSD by the end of the book, and frankly, she became a much more interesting character after that, so I wish we’d known her story all along. Instead the author coyly teases us with glimpses of her flashbacks that turn out to be memories of not her trauma but someone else’s; they’re quite misleading, as if the author hadn’t decided what her trauma was going to be until toward the end of the book. This, along with all the characters and plot swerves that fell by the wayside, gave the book the feeling of an early draft that would have been improved enormously with some cleanup.… (more)