A review by kblincoln
Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang
5.0
I'm not a huge thriller reader, but wow, Zero Sum Game was action, guns, impossible leaps, motorcycle gang battles, stashes of weapons and supplies in various parts of LA, shadowy organizations, conspiracy, a scary psychopath who somehow ends up being a "good" guy, and a protagonist who uses math to overcome all odds.
Cas Russell sees vectors, angles and calculations of probability, and statistics wherever she goes. Thus, if she's in an alley, she can throw a baseball at the wall and have it bounce off several times and hit a punk kid in the side of the head. She can calculate the exact angle of a bullet needed to get her out of a locked room with three armed bad guys.
She's very cool. And paranoid. She has one person in the whole world she can trust...Rio. Who just happens to be a brutal killer whose only check is a belief he is doing God's work. So when Rio gets her involved in rescuing a girl kidnapped by a drug cartel, Cas readily jumps in.
Only things aren't as simple as they seem. The girl acts stupidly naive, and her sister makes Cas feel odd. Things start blowing up, people start coming after Cas, and a PI who doesn't approve of Rio at all connects it all to a possibly conspiracy.
I read this in like two days. The action grips you, and then Cas's cool abilities and her relationship with the PI and Rio keep you going. Don't get me wrong, this is not a love triangle. Cas and Rio have some kind of bond that is frustratingly not explained through most of the book, and only hinted at near the end, but let's just say (don't want to spoil) that Rio's psychopathy and his unique reactions to Cas feature heavily in the plot of this book.
Once they identify one of the main bad guys, there were a couple of repetitive "let's entrap this person" that took just a bit of suspension of disbelief, but truthfully the nature of how Cas has to defend herself from this bad guy was so fascinating (and chilling) that I didn't care. Plus the action scenes, heavily laden with real-seeming gun knowledge.
And what is it about psychopaths that fascinate us so? Rio was so cool. And the hints about Rio's connection to Cas at the end of the book are irresistible. I need to know their history. Darn it, why isn't the next book out now?
Cas Russell sees vectors, angles and calculations of probability, and statistics wherever she goes. Thus, if she's in an alley, she can throw a baseball at the wall and have it bounce off several times and hit a punk kid in the side of the head. She can calculate the exact angle of a bullet needed to get her out of a locked room with three armed bad guys.
She's very cool. And paranoid. She has one person in the whole world she can trust...Rio. Who just happens to be a brutal killer whose only check is a belief he is doing God's work. So when Rio gets her involved in rescuing a girl kidnapped by a drug cartel, Cas readily jumps in.
Only things aren't as simple as they seem. The girl acts stupidly naive, and her sister makes Cas feel odd. Things start blowing up, people start coming after Cas, and a PI who doesn't approve of Rio at all connects it all to a possibly conspiracy.
I read this in like two days. The action grips you, and then Cas's cool abilities and her relationship with the PI and Rio keep you going. Don't get me wrong, this is not a love triangle. Cas and Rio have some kind of bond that is frustratingly not explained through most of the book, and only hinted at near the end, but let's just say (don't want to spoil) that Rio's psychopathy and his unique reactions to Cas feature heavily in the plot of this book.
Once they identify one of the main bad guys, there were a couple of repetitive "let's entrap this person" that took just a bit of suspension of disbelief, but truthfully the nature of how Cas has to defend herself from this bad guy was so fascinating (and chilling) that I didn't care. Plus the action scenes, heavily laden with real-seeming gun knowledge.
And what is it about psychopaths that fascinate us so? Rio was so cool. And the hints about Rio's connection to Cas at the end of the book are irresistible. I need to know their history. Darn it, why isn't the next book out now?