The Never Game
-
-
4.1 • 1.2K Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
The first installment in Jeffery Deaver’s Colter Shaw series—the inspiration for the upcoming CBS original series TRACKER starring Justin Hartley!
The son of a survivalist family, Colter Shaw is an expert tracker. Now he makes a living as a “reward seeker,” traveling the country to help police solve crimes and locate missing persons for private citizens.
“You’ve been abandoned. Escape if you can. Or die with dignity.”
Hired by the father of a young woman who has gone missing in Silicon Valley, Shaw's search takes him into the dark heart of America’s cutthroat billion-dollar video-game industry. When another person goes missing, Shaw must ask: Is a madman bringing a twisted video game to life?
Encountering eccentric designers, trigger-happy gamers, and ruthless tech titans, Shaw soon learns that he isn't the only one on the hunt: someone is on his trail and closing fast....
Named a Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Never Game proves once more why “Deaver is a genius when it comes to manipulation and deception” (Associated Press).
CBS, CBS Eye Design, and related logos are trademarks of CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license.
TRACKER is a trademark of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Used under license.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Colter Shaw, the hero of this superb series launch from Thriller Award winner Deaver (the Lincoln Rhyme series), travels around the U.S. in an RV, earning rewards for finding missing persons, fugitives, and "suspects who have not yet been identified or located." In the prologue, Colter attempts to rescue a kidnapped pregnant woman, Elizabeth Chabelle, from a sinking fishing vessel off the California coast. With Elizabeth's fate in doubt, the action moves back two days, when Colter goes looking for 19-year-old Sophie Mulliner in Silicon Valley. Sophie vanished after an argument with her father, who was unable to get the authorities to take his fear that she was attacked and kidnapped seriously. Colter does, and manages to locate suggestive evidence Sophie's cell phone, a bloodied rock, and a plastic shard that may have come from the teen's bike. That investigation proves to be just the tip of the iceberg after the person who abducted Sophie strikes again and Colter finds parallels between the crimes and a creepy video game called The Whispering Man. Fans of twisty suspense that pushes the envelope of plausibility without inviting disbelief will be enthralled. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
A Great Start To A Series
I primarily picked up The Never Game because I found the television series Tracker to be an interesting take on a procedural. What I found is that the TV series, despite being inspired by the first book in Deaver's Colter Shaw series, is very different from the novel.
That is not a bad thing. It becomes very apparent very quickly that when the same characters exist in different mediums that their stories branch in different directions.
I very much enjoyed the fish-out-of-water feel for Colter in this novel. He is an expert tracker who has worked as a rewardist, tracking down missing people, for a decade, but he has no familiarity with the world of video games. Thrusting him into a job in which video games play a major role puts him out of his depth and makes it a lot easier to believe that he and the people he's searching for are in real danger instead of just accepting that the hero is going to win.
The novel also lays a great foundation for the future of the series by teasing upcoming characters and family backstory. Where its fault lies is in the overuse of exposition.
While I know The Never Game is likely aimed at an audience who is as unfamiliar with Twitch streamers and gaming conventions as Colter Shaw is, the lengthy exposition for various video games, their concepts, and how people make a living streaming their game play, took me right out of the story. There has to be a better balance between that exposition and allowing Colter to dive into that new world for the sake of the mystery.
Note: This review is crossposted to StoryGraph.
Go Colter
Easy read good plot line
Good book
Good read