Good But Incomplete. As with any of the books in this series after BRAINRUSH, read the earlier books first. That said, the author introduces some new writing techniques into this book that are a refreshing change of pace, and that is most welcome. HOWEVER, the reason I dinged this book a star is because it feels like the author took one story and broke it into two – similar to how Hollywood did a lot of book to movie adaptations there for a while with the last book, except obviously here this is an author himself doing it to his own book. Yes, the combined single book of this one and the next one would have likely gone over the 600 page mark, and maybe the author didn’t think that would sell as well or some such. But this feels like a money grab, even with the solid story, with the splitting into halves.
All of that said, there is more peril than ever built into this book, though the peril in this tale is more personal (vs the last book’s more global scale).
If you’ve gotten this far in the series, you won’t be disappointed with the story here – and you’ll be reaching for the next one as soon as you’ve finished this one!
This review of Brainchild by Richard Bard was originally published on October 26, 2018.