Tangle's Game by Stewart Hotston: A Bit of a Mess

As always, thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy.
They say "never judge a book by its cover", to which in the case of this book a further injunction should be added which is "never judge a book by its title". What can I say? The cover is beautiful, the concept seductive but as for the text itself, well, C- would be doing it a favour.

The fundamental problems are, the plot rather than intricate is facile, the characters rather than characters are stereotypes, sometimes it seems even borrowed from far greater works, and Tangle isn't even the protagonist, this is his rather insipid and far less inspired or inspiring former flame, Amanda. Don't get me wrong it's good to have a techno thriller starring South Asians with a female lead but I really really wish this were better written.

Apart from the defects I've quoted above, there is a fundamental lack of research. For the most part if you are going to write solid sci-fi and solid thrillers you need to do your homework and it seems very little was done before writing this. I even checked the author's background to see if this shortcoming was simply because he was a man of letters writing about science, but no, apparently he has scientific qualifications it's just that the technical backdrop to this is as flimsy and unconvincing as one of those studio scenarios in the original Star Trek. It simply comes over as lacklustre. something that really got my teeth on edge was his use of "Frame" for what clearly was an IT "Window".

Regrettably I had much better things to do with my time than read this novel.