TITAN'S TEARS
CHAD LESTER
***
Unnatural things are happening on an isolated island off the coast of Alaska.
Just when Belle had thought her life couldn’t get any weirder, she finds herself arrested for murder. Only a few months ago, she was living in a peculiar village, cut off from civilization, where she suffered from bizarre hallucinations and nightmares. Then she received a mysterious invitation to work for the world’s most brilliant scientist—the enigmatic Sophia Eccleston. The pay was outstanding. The accommodations, second to none. The catch? Belle had to live on isolated island and follow strict, often bizarre security protocols.
Meanwhile a slaughterhouse worker is declared obsolete, replaced by machines, and becomes a bearded recluse. As he sits in his crumbling manor awaiting the cancer to take him, he too receives an unusual invitation to the strange island, where either his salvation or damnation awaits.
Things aren’t going well for Sophia, either. She’s facing the hostile takeover of her life’s work—her company—all while striving to keep the true identity of her eight-year-old daughter a secret. The three will meet on an isle where murder-machines and transgenic creatures run amok, in a gothic odyssey of technology unleashed.
MY REVIEW
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When Belle gets a job working for CEO and tech giant Sophia Eccleston, she is excited for the new direction in her life, but things on the mysterious island the company is located on, are not what they appear.
Titan’s Tears was a book of two halves for me – the first half is a thriller, there’s 3 central characters – Belle the Nanny, Sophia the Tech CEO and Seth, a factory worker who is slowly being made redundant due to technology. We are introduced to these characters in a way that kept my interest and each character is well defined and is different from the other two. Although Belle and Sophia’s perspectives cross together fairly early on, it’s more difficult to see how Seth fits into the picture until later. I didn’t feel like we learnt anything from Sophia’s narrative chapters, although she was keeping a lot of secrets, they weren’t really revealed until later in other characters chapters, so hers just felt a little dull when no new information was given to the reader, and it was frustratingly clear she was holding things back.
The latter half of the book is more of an action-packed techno-thriller, full of AI and murder-bots and Jurassic Park style once-extinct animals. This part wasn’t as interesting for me and a lot of it felt convenient to the plot, rather than fully formed world-building. The extinct animals park in particular, felt very underused and just thrown in to be able to compare it to Jurassic Park. The world at large was a little confusing, the ‘Modern Era – Post Singularity’ which heads up each chapter is confusing as this never changes, despite a few time-jumps in the narrative.
Overall, Titan’s Tears could do with a bit more of a stiff edit to tie it together to a cohesive story, but I thought there were some great ideas in there. Thank you to NetGalley and the author Chad Lester for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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