Impulse by Shane HallMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book by Shane Hall is meant to be a thriller and does begin with a lot of incidents that resulted in my having plenty of questions requiring answers before the end of the book. This is something that a reader naturally expects when reading a thriller. The book is set in a dystopian future with novel devices, like an innovative glow-ball, and imposed social conditions, like a singing ban, that certainly arouse the curiosity. We are introduced to an autocratic, almost tyrant-like, man known as Jack aka Grand Mogul and want to know – What is going on here?
The main characters, Eric, Will, Winona and Janet are challenged with discovering what happened to a fellow student, the brilliant inventor of the glow-ball, Freyara, when she mysteriously vanishes after a meeting with the Grand Mogul. There are numerous intrigues presented to the reader one after the other, and all within a bewildering, mainly believable scenario. But this reader still wanted more answers to the questions set by the author as the plot grew and developed.
The novel took quite a long time to increase the fast pace that one expects in a thriller. However, the latter part of the story appropriately builds the required suspense for anyone who enjoys the thriller genre - but left me disappointed with an unsatisfactory ending. It felt like a cop-out to be told that I had to read the next book in the series to find out the majority of the answers I’d been seeking. That feeling made me determined not to read any more in this series, since I felt conned. It is not a very long book and thus with the abrupt “finish” felt “unfinished”. Yes, I wanted more but in this book, the one I was reading at the time. I happen to believe that each book in a series can, and probably should, be able to stand on its own as a complete novel in its own right. This novel does not because I could not “get the point” of it.
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