arielavalon

Read this and other reviews at my blog.

For four months, Janelle has been trying to rebuild her life from the horrible catastrophes around the world, the loss of her father and best friend, and Ben Michaels left. He promised to return to her, and now time is passing and she is wishing and wishing it would happen soon. People in her world are coming up missing, and when Taylor Barclay shows up, she knows that the cases are more than she expected. Someone is running a human-trafficking ring and Ben is the IA's top suspect. Can her and Barclay join forces and prove Ben's innocence, or will Ben and everyone he loves be executed? When the evidence piles up, she begins to wonder if she really knew Ben like she thought.

First things first, I highly recommend that you go read the novella Undone before you read this. It will help you out quite a bit in the way of not spending most of this novel hating Ben Michaels with a passion.

The great thing about these books, is really the writing style. They are written based on time stamps instead of real chapters, which is rather cool honestly, but it's the tone of things that makes them amazing. The tone of Unraveling was more upbeat. It was a fun story that quickly changed as the plot thickened and the suspense increased. Unbreakable didn't have that upbeat mood. It was dark from the start. If you weren't really paying attention and appreciating things, you would almost think that it was boring to read. But the tone that is set is amazing when you really look at it. It's a dark story and the tone of the novel really reinforces that.

The characters are changed. The world basically fell apart. They have all had to grow and mature faster than they should have. They are all still the characters that we know and love. I think the best part of this novel for me though, was Taylor Barclay. You want to hate him because of what you know of him in Unraveling, but I just couldn't. The more of him I saw, the more I liked, until I reached the point where I kept hoping for some romance between him and Janelle. I adore Barclay now.

The plot was very dark and wonderfully told. Pieces were perfectly woven together so that you had trouble predicting things. The character interactions and conflicts were perfectly timed and never took over the plot unless they were meant to.

If you are just reading through and not the type of person who really gets into a novel, you aren't going to like this. If you are the type who analyses things and commits to a novel until the last page, you will appreciate the nuances and writing style the whole way through. This series seems like it will only keep getting darker, and that might not be for everyone. I, however, will be reading the next installment as soon as possible upon release.