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L'Autre Chair (2013)

by Michael Olson(Favorite Author)

3.34 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

2070137449 (ISBN13: 9782070137442)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Gallimard

review 1: It's taking a lot for me to not write "not my genre, not my genre" over and over, but I think it's just that this was not that good.The story revolves around a mysterious suicide, which then brings our hero into a corporate underworld of sorts where people are inventing virtual reality sex robots. So there's plenty of virtual reality robot sex, plenty of reality reality non-robot sex, and a murder mystery that plays second fiddle to all the virtual sex being had and discussed in the book.It's really a total bait-and-switch. What could have been a fun cyberpunk murder mystery devolved very quickly into less-than-compelling romp through faux-online communities and fetish sexuality, none of any of the prime points quite good enough to hold my interest. And my hopes for a s... moreuitable ending, by the time I was too far in to give up, were dashed by an incredibly drawn out final arc, which matched extremely well with how long it took to get to the meat of the story to begin with.I may be judging this more harshly than I should, since mainstream murder mysteries have never been anything that piqued my interest, but this is unfortunately fatally flawed from the first page to the last, and I don't know how I could recommend it to anyone in good faith.
review 2: The tone of this book is young heterosexual male fantasy set in a world of computer hacking and online game development. On this background is told a tale of sibling rivalry and revenge. Twins Blythe and Blake Randall are recently graduated from Harvard and now running the family business, which strongly resembles Comcast. Their estranged half brother, Billy, has taken his share of the family fortune to the online gaming sector. Billy is convinced his siblings caused the death of his girlfriend, Gina, whose alleged suicide is horrifically depicted in the first two pages of the book. Billy works toward revenge on his siblings through his online game based on the The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Because Billy has disappeared into the online world, the sometime friend of the Randall twins, James, a clever computer hacker and security expert, is employed to search for him. James goes undercover at GAME, the computer game development company where Billy last worked. There, James infiltrates the secret virtual sex game development group and you can imagine what research and development is like there. Lots of action ensues and it is generally a pretty exciting story.I can't imagine recommending this book to anyone I know. It would most likely appeal to the young male computer hacker, a class that is probably underrepresented in the readers of modern fiction. less

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