When Angela Hoot is kicked off her graduate programme at MIT for hacking into the computer of a fellow student, she fears she’s blown her chances of a glittering career.

Angela is wrong: instead, she’s offered a dream internship with the FBI. She jumps at the chance, and is thrown straight into her first case at a house in the Boston suburbs where a family of five have been brutally murdered.

As Angela struggles to come to terms with the harsh reality of her new job, a phone is found that could hold the secrets of this mass murder – if Angela is able to uncover them.

Despite reviews on amazon giving his book a mixed feeling of what it contains, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I found the characters to be acceptable and well driven and enjoyed the fast past nature of the narrative. I felt that I got to understand the main characters equally and by the end of the book could understand their actions and even predict them. There was a slight blip near the reveal at the end where the pace and adrenaline were moving so fast that I think some of the narrative and understanding was lost but it wasn’t so much a hinderance than a mild annoyance.

I suppose this will get turned into a series -who knows really- but I feel like Angela would be a good character to build upon and explore further as this book has shown she is more than just her IQ.

Last year I tried to read the first ‘women’s murder club’ book by James Patterson and never got passed the first third of the book. I found it very difficult and challenging in many different ways, so ultimately gave up. I wanted to give his writings another go, so I got this.

A lot of the amazon reviews seem to slam this book as being predictable and subpar. In the kindle version after the acknowledgements, there are 2 pages of Patterson’s other works. I’m not at all familiar with him as an author but I noticed at ALL book series apart from his first a ‘co-author written’, which resonated deeply within me. There are many questions this knowledge brings up in me but as I do not know much of Patterson, I shall leave my questions within my mind and not muddy the waters.

However, one thing that really annoyed me about this book – and I had the same problem when I tried to read that other one of his – is the shortness of chapters. The 1-3 page chapters are really jarring and create a ‘jolting experience’ that continually pushed me out of what I was reading. It made the book seem very stop-start and is really an unnecessary way of writing.

To be perfectly honest, I’m slightly ‘merry’ at the moment as am on high strength pain killers for my back injury, so having just entered the newly created ‘Tier 4’ for Christmas at my parents, I am mostly sleeping – meds make me sleeping – and waking up for moments of reading. It’s kind of my perfect life – except for the crippling pain! This book however, served as a much needed distraction to the above and perhaps that’s why I enjoyed it so much. I wasn’t particularly unique and I could have easily worked out the basic plot – had my brain been at its full capacity – but I still enjoyed the read.

On the traffic light system I’ve developed in my head only, I’d say this crime/thriller was a low orange. (Red = heart pounding, creepy, twisted & thrilling. Orange = thriller elements, fast paced, quick read, ‘cozy average’. Green = crime in name only, easily solved, no development.)

Still, if there was a sequel I would probably read it.