The Thought Readers

Read in one day. Darren can freeze time but still move around during this time, which has enabled him to (cheat) his way through school and incredible success as a hedge fund trader by the time he's in his early 20s. This book follows him as he discovers much more about his ability - perhaps more than he wanted to know.

Extremely fast paced, the story keeps your interest throughout. It must have been a challenge for the author(s) to deal with multiple dimensions at once, yet they were able to very clearly follow the adventure; I think there was only once that I got a bit confused with multiple people zoning in and out.

I don't normally read sci fi, but this one grabbed me, partially because the environment is the current U.S. I already show more bought the next in the series, and have sent both to my husband's Kindle for him to enjoy.

Edit to add: Darren really isn't all that likable in many ways, but it's kinda fun watching him get knocked around a bit by the discoveries he makes (evil laugh) show less

The Thought Readers

This is the 14th book in Paranormal 13. Apparently, there are 14 books instead of 13 like the title suggests.

At first, after reading the first few pages of this book, I thought, “This guy is way too narcissistic for me,” because of the way the author made the main character so cocky. There is a part where he gets detained by two casino employees. They start reading from a file they had compiled about him and start reading off all of his accomplishments. One of the casino thugs reads, “Darren Wang Goldberg, graduated Harvard with an MBA and law degree at eighteen. Near perfect SAT, LSAT, GMAT, GRE, scores. CFA, CPA, plus a bunch more acronyms.” I was just thinking that this author went WAY too overboard on show more trying to make this guy too cool and impressive. But then the author goes on to explain that he got those basically by cheating which peeked my interest.

Darren discovered when he was about nine or ten years old that he could go into something that he calls “The Quiet” where time basically stops and everything stops moving. He can step out of his body and do all kinds of things like in the casino where he goes into the Quiet and looks at all the players’ cards and the tops cards in the dealer’s deck. He can move things around but when he goes back into himself, everything is back where it was when he started.

As far as he knows, he is the only one who can do this until a woman sits down at the poker table and when he goes into the Quiet, she’s doing the same thing. She looks at him and then runs. He was detained by the casino thugs so she got away but the thugs have a file on her too so he looks at it and vows to find her.

I knew without looking that a man wrote the book. There are differences in the way women and men write…well, most of the time…J.R. Ward writes like a man but besides her, I can usually tell the difference between men and woman’s writing. One difference is that women tend to be overly moral. Their heroes and heroines have strict moral and ethical boundaries. Their heroines are virtuous and rarely slutty yet the men are sometimes he-sluts. They don’t usually cheat, steal or take advantage of people. Men, on the other hand, stretch the moral boundaries of their characters. Darren’s character had no problem cheating, stealing and getting paid for doing nothing.

I laughed a lot while reading this book. The author, Dima Zales (one of those names that could be female or could be male), had a great sense of humor. I could tell the author is highly intelligent and maybe even a bit of a nerd just by his humor. I have a few nerds and computer geek friends and know that they notice hilarious things about people that average people don’t see and when they point it out, it cracks me up. This author did that.

So, Darren works at a hedge fund company in New York. I was unclear about what his title was or what he actually did for the company but it sounded like his boss thinks he is some sort of profiler or mentalist who reads the body language and other clues of people. His boss calls him into his office and asks him to “do what you do” and interview the CTO of some company to find out what their big announcement that they are going to announce in a few weeks will be. If they can find out what it will be, they will have an advantage over others in the financial market.

Darren uses his gift and freezes time or whatever it is he does. The author goes into great detail explaining it later but my eyes glazed over and I skipped a bunch of it. Anyway, he freezes time and rifles through the CTO’s desk and finds the information. He then notices things that a mentalist would notice like how the CTO was looking down while he was talking which meant he was lying and how there were two books without dust on them on the bookshelf about the subject of what the company was working on. After getting the information, Darren writes up an email to his boss and sets it to go out on Friday to make it look like he had been working on it all week since his boss will never know because he works from home a lot. He then decides to take the rest of the week off. Do you see what I mean about his sketchy ethics?

He has his computer hacker friend help him find, Mira, the woman from the casino and he goes to her apartment in Brooklyn. She’s not home but her brother is. He answers the door with a gun pointed at Darren.

Darren learns that Mira and her brother can both do what he does but they call themselves “Readers”. Readers have enemies called “Pushers”. Mira’s brother, Eugene, teaches Darren how to “Read”. When he is in the Quiet, if he touches a person, but it can’t be another Reader, he can read their mind. Depending on how strong a Reader is, they can read back for an hour, day or longer. Darren seems to be able to go back many years which astounds Eugene.

Pushers can push people to do things they don’t want to do like kill other people. Mira and Eugene seem to think all Pushers are evil.

Mira gets kidnapped by some thugs and Pushers are behind it. Now, Darren has to help rescue her using his gift.

I liked Darren’s character and I enjoyed the book. I did get a little lost when Eugene went into detail of how their gift worked but it was only a few paragraphs that I skipped over. Maybe one day, I will read the rest of the books in the series.

www.paranormalromance.com show less

Darren Wang Goldberg makes use of his puzzling and unique talent to keep on top at his job as a financial analyst. But when he discovers a woman who apparently has this same talent, he sets out to track her down and get some answers about how the Quiet works.

What Darren discovers turns his world upside down and throws him into the center of a kidnapping/power struggle that he is ill-equipped to understand. Will he find he answers he needs? And what will he learn about his extraordinary talent?

Told entirely from Darren’s point of view, this science fiction tale is heavy on entertainment and light on hard science, making for a quick read. Readers discover the salient facts right along with Darren, an artifice that keeps them involved show more in the telling of the tale. Central to the story, Darren is the most fleshed-out of the characters; perhaps successive stories will incorporate stronger characterizations for the supporting characters. Regrettably, Darren, although consistently candid, tends to drift between being either puerile or prurient, keeping him from becoming fully relatable to frustrated readers.

The premise at the heart of the narrative is a compelling one; the hinted-at sociological/psychological impact of the Quiet is worthy of further investigation. Hopefully, as the story unfolds in succeeding books, it will rise above its current trite exclusivity as a good/bad trope. Although the predictable story is intriguing enough to encourage readers to continue with the second book in the series, the abrupt ending here fails to tie up even one of the storylines and is certain to be hugely disappointing for everyone. Even if the ending of the book is destined to be a cliffhanger, readers deserve some closure on major points in the current storyline.

But it’s the the overuse of an offensive, unnecessary-to-the-plot expletive that is both demeaning and off-putting for readers and lowers the rating for the book.

Recommended for readers who enjoy soft science fiction. show less

Really could use a good editor. But the story is good. I even found myself wondering about what awaits in the next book.

Sehr spannend, gut geschrieben.
Die deutsche Übersetzung ist stellenweise ein wenig holprig, aber selten genug, dass es nicht stört.
Kein großer Tiefgang, macht aber großen Spaß. Ideale Lektüre, wenn man auf der Suche nach leichter, guter Unterhaltung ist.