3:13 AM

This is a decent read and Catherine definitely has writing talent, but my main criticism is the amount of scene setting and repetitive information about luxurious food, drink, restaurants and standards of living that bring little to the storytelling table. Filler to avoid getting on with the plot.

The world building is quite lovely, though, with its life of luxury around Thailand and other parts of world. Think of this book as an improbable precursor to a James Bond movie with potential for incredible action and dastardly espionage, backstabbing and manic helicopter chases.

The book builds up slowly and then goes into a bananas realm of inexplicable walking dead, world-destroying viruses and a level of WTF implausibility that's hard to grasp. I got confused between dystopia, sci-fi, horror or a post-apocalyptic crime thriller scenario?

If fights hard to get an identity then suddenly loses it by trying to cover too many angles, being so slow on the one hand and suddenly outlandish on the other, with not enough middle ground or solid plot to cover everything.

Secret agents have a magical mind-bending ability to see into the future and predict our ultimate demise, who can even bring down helicopters with their supernatural powers! This confused me even more and I'm adding a superhero Marvel comic identity to my list. Laser eyes next?

And the love interest(s) kind of happened without any eroticism or interesting details. People just get together, right, which felt flat.

3:13 feels like an outlier to a long-running series where you need to invest from the start to find out what happens next, and although I liked chunks of this book, the dangling story threads and coming-soon approach was too commercial and representative of weak storytelling for me.

My advice. Stick to the James Bond romanticism, flesh out the relationships better, reign in the outlandish and simply not-happening scary horror elements, especially the insta-glacier conquering scenes and FBI chases, which were poor, and try to link it all together as a crime thriller with investigative action and suspense.

We don't need to be informed about wine quaffing every other sentence either.

Two encouraging stars for effort.