Kari Chapman's Reviews > Clockwork Heart

** spoiler alert ** This book started out very strongly. The world was fascinating - a nice setting, a strong caste system that has a way for people to change from the caste that they were born it, good characters. The introduction scene was great. I loved meeting Taya, Cristof and Alister.

However, about a third of the way through the book falters and continues going slowly downhill from there. It started with a personal dislike of mine - drama for the sake of drama. Taya and Christof are both at the scene of an accident that killed Alister, and instead of trying to help look for survives start desperately accusing each other of being the saboteur, based on very little evidence on both their parts. They are interviewed and released, but decide to team up to continue investigating the accident. Now, obviously this needs to happen, since they are the main characters of the story. However, there was no reason for them to do so. They had no special knowledge, skills or contacts that the police did not have. They had no reason to believe the police incompetent or corrupt. The only reason they did this was because they felt personally involved and they didn't want to stop being personally involved. Granted, Christof was involved to a point that I could have accepted him deciding to stay involved and then dragging Taya into it, but it happened the other way. Christof was going to step back and Taya insisted on continuing.

It was also obvious to me that Alister didn't actually die in the accident - that he staged it so as to free himself to perform nefarious deeds. The way Taya was constantly not comfortable around him earlier, despite her desire to be comfortable around him, made it pretty good that he was going to do something not-nice. As soon as he was "dead" it was clear what that not-nice thing was going to be.

The book did pick up a bit during the investigation, though the confrontation between Taya and the bad guy went a bit long.

The book wrapped up fairly nicely after that. Except for the fact that there were 100 pages left to go. It turns out that not all the suspicious activity from earlier in the book was related to bad guy #1. So now bad guy #2 steps up for his turn in the plot. I kept going for a while, but the longer that story line went the more I just skimmed until I finally skipped to the last chapter. All of the tension of the book was spent in Ending #1 - there was nothing saved to keep me interested in Ending #2 when it felt like we'd already wrapped up. The two separate bad guys either needed to be more closely entwined, Ending #1 needed to have been not such a big thing, or the second story line should have been left out altogether.

That said, I liked Taya, Christof and the world. It looks like there's a new book in the series either out now or coming soon and despite the flaws of this book I'll give book 2 a try and hope that the writing has improved.