October 21, 2013
Henrik “HP” Pettersson, the hero of de la Motte’s high-tech trilogy that began with Game, doubles down in installment two, as he matches wits with the ruthless powers behind “the Game,” an alternate-reality game he was lured into playing four months earlier. In Dubai, HP meets Anna Argos, the glamorous cofounder of ArgosEye, an IT consultancy company in Stockholm, who disappears. HP risks returning home to Stockholm, where he goes undercover at ArgosEye in hopes of discovering, among other things, what connection Anna might have with the game. Meanwhile, HP’s sister, Rebecca Normén, finds herself suspended from Sweden’s Security Police while fighting trumped-up charges, as well as targeted by a mystery blogger who may be stalking her. As the dual story lines pinball off one another, the author, an IT security consultant, provides an insider’s peek at stealth corporate manipulation of social media while maximizing the rush of this heady, hallucinatory trip. Agent: Federico Ambrosini, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden).
November 15, 2013
Following the events of Game (2013), the first volume in de la Motte's crime-fiction trilogy, HP Pettersson is on the run. And with good reason. After he learned that the mysterious Game, a sort of real-world role-playing exercise, wasn't all it was cracked up to be, HP cleaned out the Game's bank account as payback for all the misery he'd been forced to inflict on innocent people. Now he's flitting around the world, living under various assumed names, trying to find someplace where the Game can't find himand, oh boy, do they want to find him. In Dubai, HP hooks up with a beautiful woman who almost immediately vanishes. Believing this could be the Game's way of getting its revenge, HP determines to find out what happened to the woman. The English translation, again by Neil Smith, is smoother and more colloquial than Game's. The story here is just as exciting as in the first book, and the prose itself is more fluid. A definite improvement on its predecessor and reason to look forward to volume three.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)