The Grrrl of Limberlost by Annie Pearson Review

Title: The Grrrl of Limberlost

Author: Annie Pearson

My Rating: 3/5

Part of a series? yes, book two of the Rain City Comedy of Manners series

Genre(s): Adult fiction, Mystery, Social commentary, some comedy. 

Description/Blurb:

A murder in a Seattle coffee house. A murder on her father’s decaying boat dock on Puget Sound. All of this has nothing to do with Sam, she insists. She’s heroically fending off a criminal attack on the world’s cyber infrastructure—if she could only get anyone to answer the phone on Christmas day. 

After escaping exurban life on Limberlost Island a decade earlier, Sam became a rockstar among anti-hacker security programmers: appearing at BlackHat conferences in vintage t-shirts and combat boots; investigating international security conspiracies with the FBI and NSA. 

Now Sam is dragged sideways by chaos back on Limberlost Island: her brother accidentally embroiled her flakey father with gun runners; the boy next door came home as prodigal son, hiding from Eastern European gangsters; a porn farmer thinks he’s in love. 

Meanwhile, the local weather guru promises that the large cold air mass headed for the Puget Sound Conversion Zone will dump record snow. Seattle is always paralysed when it snows.

The Grrrl of Limberlost follows three self-absorbed voices through the frenzy and terror in their daily lives, mired in family losses and betrayals, while weaponised malware threatens to ruin Christmas. The key mystery: which voice is the unreliable narrator?

My review: 

Well this book was certainly something different. It took me a little while to get into the book because for a while you're having to maintain three separate storylines in your head but it gets easier to read when you can begin to see the links between the characters as their stories cross over though many things don't become entirely clear until the end and even then you're left assuming that you're right as not everything is written down in black and white.

I would recommend this to a person who likes a true mystery, who doesn't mind being kept in the dark for long periods. This book needs patience to be enjoyed, the reader has to be happy to lie back and let the story take its course, sure it's possible to pick up clues along the way but because of the twists and turns you can't put it all together half way through the book as you can with some other novels. This can be good or bad depending on how you like your books, personally I found it quite refreshing. Now I did have bit of a niggle with the comments to the blog in Nicky's story, the book starts off with these comments and it was a bit confusing to jump straight into this as I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but I can't really complain because it didn't take me long to grasp the idea and the comments actually added an interesting dimension to the story.

The characters were generally quite well fleshed out, not all of them were likeable or relatable but this helped add to the suspense in my eyes. Nicky felt a bit misguided, even a bit delusional at times so you can't really predict what he's going to do next. Matt's character was another one who added to the suspense, you think you know him and can begin to see where he's going from then something from his past comes to light and you have to go over all his actions in you head in this new light. This really helped keep the book interesting, though there were still a couple of places where the plot development felt a little slow.

This book is worth a read if you enjoy a bit of a mystery and have a spare few hours, I don't see it becoming a world famous classic but it's enjoyable all the same.