I love Kelley Armstrong’s work, and The Masked Truth is no exception. A group of troubled teens spends a weekend in therapy camp, and are taken hostage by a group of masked men. It’s a scary premise, and Armstrong lives up to expectations, keeping the pace on an adrenaline high throughout.

The main characters are Riley, who had witnessed the brutal murder of a couple she was babysitting for, and Max, whose psychiatric condition leads him to doubt everything he sees. Both characters are kickass and well-developed, and as always, Armstrong’s heroine is a standout.

Armstrong also gives us a glimpse into the reality of schizophrenia — I knew of the condition, but had no idea how terrifying it could be, or how dangerous it could make someone given a lack of treatment and the wrong circumstances.

The ending was a bit of a letdown, with the big reveal being far more convoluted than it had to be. The story also required major suspension of disbelief throughout, and while I don’t necessarily expect realism in a thriller that read very much like an action movie on the page, there were a few times in this novel where I had to silence that little voice in my head telling me something didn’t make sense. Ironically, for a novel about three masked men taking a group of teens hostage, it was the aftermath of the incident that felt most unbelievable.

Still, the story is an exciting ride overall. Just suspend your disbelief and enjoy the ride; you’ll find it hard to put this novel down.

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Thanks to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Imagine if a medical procedure could transfer your consciousness into a perfected version of your body. Imagine if cancer, AIDS and all sorts of illnesses can be cured, and those afflicted could wake up one morning in a perfect copy of their body, minus whatever genetic or cellular matter led to the disease in the first place. It sounds like the set-up for a Gattaca-type thriller, and I was pleasantly surprised that Jessica Chiarella’s And Again did not feel like a sci fi novel at all.

Rather than focus on the miraculous nature of the procedure, or on the corporate and political bodies attempting to benefit from its existence, Chiarella focuses on the patients who underwent the procedure. While at least two of the patients are fairly high profile (David is a conservative Congressman and Connie is a soap opera star), and while at least part of the plot does mention the political machinery behind the procedure, the bulk of the story focuses intimately on the individual lives that benefited from it. The question Chiarella poses is not so much what good or evil this procedure can bring humanity, but rather: how would you feel living life as a perfected copy of yourself?

It’s a haunting question, and particularly poignant in the case of one of the patients, Linda, who was in a car accident eight years prior and had been completely paralyzed ever since. How would it feel to be able to walk and talk again, and how could she cope with a family whose lives have moved on without her? I especially love how she comes home and finds solace in watching the soap opera she’d watched every day in her hospital bed, a rather sad reminder of what has become her normal.

Also compelling is the story of Connie, an actress whose career had ended when she was diagnosed with AIDS. The procedure gives her a new chance in her career, but what I really found touching was the friendship she’d formed with her elderly neighbour after her diagnosis. She returns home after the procedure, thinking it was mostly her looks that have changed, and her neighbour, who is blind, thinks she’s a stranger because her voice and her scent have also changed. It raises the question of how much would actually remain of you, if your body changes.

This question is most urgent for another patient, Hannah, who though the novel is told in the alternating voices of all four patients, still feels like the main character. Hannah is an artist, yet after the procedure, she realizes that she seems to have lost her talent. A comparison of her self-portraits from before and after the procedure reveals that while the subject had become younger and more attractive, the post-procedure work lacked that special something that had once made her work great.

Chiarella raises some interesting questions about personal identity, though I also wonder if focusing on a single character would have allowed her to delve into these questions a bit more deeply. Does artistic talent such as Hannah’s reside in the genes and memory, or is there some muscle memory formed as well over time, which would be lost in a new body? How desperate must a conservative politician like David be to go against his own beliefs and agree to being cloned, or are all his “beliefs” just presented for votes? Connie’s resurgence of beauty is briefly touched upon when she encounters her former agent in her new body, but the responses to it remain fairly shallow — this may be the point, but I wonder how much of the depth of emotion she brings to her roles may have been sacrificed in this new body? And Linda’s story just had a few random twists that I felt detracted from what I had found so compelling about her in the first place.

The book is well-written and the stories beautifully told. Though I admit I thought Hannah and Connie’s stories felt a bit more complete, whereas Linda and David’s stories felt somewhat abruptly cut off, Chiarella manages to juggle all four characters well enough. At the very least, this book raises some interesting questions for the reader, and inspires you to imagine: what if you are given a second chance, with a genetically perfect version of your body? What would you do with it?

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Princeling of Nanjing is the best Ava Lee book I’ve read in a while. Hamilton’s books are often very action-packed, which sometimes makes it easy to forget that Ava Lee isn’t a superhero vigilante but rather a forensic accountant. Princeling features several chapters of pure, unadulterated financial sleuthing, which both gave me some nerdy feels and tickled my puzzle-loving mind.

Princeling begins with the launch of Ava’s business’s fashion line, but quickly turns its focus onto the business troubles of Ava’s friend Xu. A Triad boss who bribes powerful families to keep his businesses afloat, Xu is facing pressure from the Tsai family to manufacture synthetic drugs. The Tsais are the most powerful family in Nanjing, its patriarch the titular “Princeling” of the region, and while Xu wants nothing less than to return to drug manufacturing, he knows that disobedience may mean his other businesses will be taken down.

I love a lot of things about this book, first being how clearly Ava misses her old work with Uncle. By co-founding the Three Sisters business, Ava appears to have entered a new chapter in her life, and left her work with Uncle completely behind. Princeling shows that Ava isn’t pulled into her old ways reluctantly, and in fact Xu hasn’t asked her for help. Rather, it’s Ava’s own desire for that old adrenaline rush that prompts her to help, and this in turn helps her realize how much her old job has become an inescapable part of who she is. To that end, what somewhat annoyed me was Ava’s naivete in thinking that the Tsais wouldn’t notice her investigation or that they wouldn’t connect it to her. After seven novels and countless more cases, I’d think Ava would know better.

The other thing I love so much about this book, as I mentioned earlier, is all the financial puzzle-solving that happens. In order to take down the Tsai family, Ava follows the money trail of their various companies. Hamilton takes us step by step through her investigation, and presents us with flowcharts that show just how extensive the Tsais’ network is. It’s fascinating, and I love seeing Ava’s brain work. This being an Ava Lee book of course, there is the requisite bak mei scene and the requisite big violent confrontation scene. Those are fine, but it’s really in the brainstorming scenes that I think Ava Lee shines the most.

Princeling may have been the best Ava Lee book I’ve read in a while, but it also highlighted some weaknesses of the series in general. I’ve mentioned in my review of an earlier book that Hamilton sometimes uses easy stereotypes when attempting to depict a particular culture (the Philippines in that particular instance). In Princeling, I came across this line that just made me cringe: “It sure beats doing business on Negros Island in the Philippines, or a hundred other backwaters I’ve worked.” “Backwaters,” Mr. Hamilton? Really? I read the Advance Reading Copy, and I hope some editor strikes that line before the final print.

As well, so many characters commented on how extraordinarily beautiful Ava is, with Ava demurring each time that she really wasn’t. Unsure why I found this annoying, though I think it’s partly because Ava seems so perfect she’s almost superhuman. She displayed some vulnerability in an earlier book when she was worried about Uncle’s health, but otherwise, there’s a coldness and detachment in Hamilton’s dialogue that makes me somewhat imagine Ava to be a replicant from the film Blade Runner. 

This sense of detachment also results in an artificiality to some of the cultural references. When mentioning some aspects of certain cultures, characters sometimes come off more like tour guides than people who live within that culture. Take the following dialogue for example:

“Where are you from?” Pang said. “Your Putonghua has a distinct accent.”

“I’m Canadian, and there we most often refer to it as Mandarin.” (p. 21)

I can understand that Hamilton is writing for a non-Chinese audience who may not recognize the term “Putonghua.” But it just sounds a bit off in terms of actual conversation. I think that’s what also strikes me as a bit off about some of the descriptions, and while I understand that Hamilton has to balance natural characterization with clarity for an international audience, I wish he had done it more smoothly. I wish that his characters feel like they’re acting within their world rather than explaining their world to us.

That being said, this still is the best of the Ava Lee series to date, and I thoroughly enjoyed the read even with my reservations above. The next instalment is The Couturier of Milan. Fashion and Milan — I’m definitely excited for that!

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Thank you to House of Anansi for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.