More of a 3.5 for me as the outdated computer talk sometimes threw me for a loop. Let me warn any non-gamers or too young to remember how to run a program off of a floppy disk readers - some of this is downright silly sounding, but it's pretty true.

At first I found it hard to get into the characters. Zac spends a lot of time acting a bit too amateur to seem like a hard hitting private eye and Gwen seems to flippant to be a strong small business owner. Together, with Zac obviously falling for Gwen first, their conversations were a bit difficult to not roll my eyes at.

Also I'll be honest, the true villain here is so easy to spot I was a bit annoyed. A lot of time is spent on seemingly red herring distractions that I'm not quite sure when the plot decided those distractions were important observations. Especially when half the time Zac or Gwen out right says "This info is trivial and barely worth noting".

Spoiler: that isn't EVER TRUE of anything found out.

I did appreciate that Gwen was hesitant to trust Zac. He was blackmailing her into helping him then decided to add a personal relationship to that. It was a bit...squicky with the implications and Gwen was quick to point that out. He seemed perfectly fine with compartmentalizing and Gwen, like any reasonable person honestly, was like "um no? How do you not see the problem here?"

Overall I enjoyed the book enough to want to read book two THE CHILLING DECEPTION and see where this twosome goes. ( )