*I received a free copy of this e-book as part of the “Fateful Eyes” book tour in exchange for an honest review.*
Peter Romanos is a Greek living in England in the midst of the IT bubble collapse. A once fruitfully employed tech professional with his own company (worth millions on paper) he is now living off the generosity of his girlfriend’s father while working a temporary job for the company he quit to start his own ill-fated venture. While working his temp job in Manila Peter is approached via email, phone, and letter by a mysterious woman claiming to be his daughter…and now Peter is on a mission to find out who this girl really is.
Amid continuous and confusing jumps in time the reader follows Peter on his quest to find a new, permanent job, to find out who his mysterious daughter is, coming to terms with the post 9/11 world, and a mysterious interrogation in an airport whose context remains unknown throughout the novel.
The novel keeps you wondering throughout as to whether or not Peter is being scammed by a woman claiming to be his daughter, and what exactly this mysterious woman (if there even is a single woman on the other side of the computer) wants from him, setting the scene for a continuing saga in book two.
While Panos shows promise in his writing the book could use a little more editing. As the author states in his introductory notes this novel is written in “the style of a Greek speaking the English language”. While this makes sense in the parts where Peter is speaking in first person and in dialog the third person narrative using this specific brand of English comes across as poorly written. There are
The shifts in time could also use a little work from an editor. While these shifts work to create a multi-layer story they happen too frequently and with too little context for them to be as effective as they could. While the reader is provided with dates at the beginning of these sections they don’t provide nearly enough context for the story to make sense until you’ve moved on to the next jump in time. The author takes on too much here and what could have been a tightly woven mystery ends up as a lot of text to wade through to follow the plot.
As a side note I would also like to comment, on a purely personal level, about the author’s handling of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that devastated the U.S. While initially it seems that this is just another aspect of the plot, as the story continues it seems the author is just using this tragedy as a platform for a political agenda. I can understand the author’s frustrations with the way the American political system handled the aftermath (as many Americans were) but I found his handling of the attacks insensitive the more he used them as a catalyst for his political opinions.
