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Title: Shattered Minds
Author: Laura Lam
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: E-ARC via Netgalley
Publication Date: 15th June 2017
Rating: 5/5 Stars

Description

She can uncover the truth, if she defeats her demons

Ex-neuroscientist Carina struggles with a drug problem, her conscience, and urges to kill. She satisfies her cravings in dreams, fuelled by the addictive drug ‘Zeal’. Now she’s heading for self-destruction – until she has a vision of a dead girl.

Sudice Inc. damaged Carina when she worked on their sinister brain-mapping project, causing her violent compulsions. And this girl was a similar experiment. When Carina realizes the vision was planted by her old colleague Mark, desperate for help to expose the company, she knows he’s probably dead. Her only hope is to unmask her nemesis – or she’s next.

To unlock the secrets Mark hid in her mind, she’ll need a group of specialist hackers. Dax is one of them, a doctor who can help Carina fight her addictions. If she holds on to her humanity, they might even have a future together. But first she must destroy her adversary – before it changes us and our society, forever.

Disclaimer

This book was kindly provided to me for honest review by the Publisher via Netgalley. This has not impacted on the content of this review, which it my own honest opinion of the book.

Review

I went into this book fairly blind. I had heard great things about the author, and from the brief description that I read, I was intrigued. I’ve been looking for something a bit different to read, and refresh my reading palate, and this book certainly did that. A futuristic sci-fi thriller with elements of heist, there wasn’t a dull moment throughout Shattered Minds. There is another book set in this world, but Shattered Minds reads as a standalone, and can be understood and enjoyed even if you haven’t read the other book.

The first thing you need to know about this book is that it is dark and gritty. The world sound idyllic on the surface, there is no crime, technology is really advanced and things seem to be still improving. However, scratch the surface, and there are some sinister things going on in the background. Tech corporations have an immense amount of power. This world took some adjusting to at first, but I soon came to grips with the basics, then it was easy to throw myself into the story.

Shattered minds has chapters from multiple perspectives. Most chapters are from the perspective of Carina, a neural programmer with a lack of empathy and an urge to kill. She is a well-developed, dark and twisty main character with flaws and a dark past. When we meet her, she is a drug addict trying to spend as much time in virtual reality as possible, even if it kills her. She is not in a good place, without hope and resigned to her fate. She is not all that easy to like, especially at first, but she is interesting, and I did route for her to succeed. Over the course of the book you find out more about Carina and her dark past, and overall, she is a really well fleshed out and compelling character.

Teaming up with some underground hackers, Carina must unlock the secrets hidden in her brain in order to take down a major corporation with sinister goals. It’s a dangerous goal and each member of the group have their own reasons. It’s an interesting and diverse group of characters, I especially liked reading Dax’s perspective.

Shattered Minds also has a strong villain, with complicated and believable motivations. With such an amoral main character, this book really needed a villain to route against. This was made all the more effective by the inclusion of chapters from the perspective of Dr Roz, the main adversary. It was so interesting and at times chilling to see her perspective.

With a plot that twists and turns, escalating as more information is revealed, Shattered Minds had me glued to the page, desperately wanting to discover the truth. The conclusion was both exciting and satisfying, and left me certain that this will not be the last book by Laura Lam that I read.