The Mindjack Series is an urban fantasy story set in a world filled with mindreaders and where some people are mindjackers who can invade your mind, break it, lock it up or make you do all kinds of things against your will. This makes jackers dangerous and some want to use them as a weapon. Zeph is a mindjacker, and he’s a powerful one, and in books 4 and 5 of this series he gets involved with people who all want to use him for their own purposes, while all he wants to do is get his family back and keep them safe.
The first three books in the series are from his sister Kira’s point of view, and at book 4 the series shifts to Zeph’s point of view. I haven’t read books 1-3 and it didn’t matter because Zeph’s story stands on its own. Kira is younger and by the looks of the blurbs for the earlier books, the story is more YA. Though Zeph is still young, and the books are technically YA, they are not too young for me to enjoy them.
A world of mindreaders and mindjackers offers many possibilities but also many traps and in the hands of a lesser author, such a world could have been riddled with inconsistencies, but Susan Kaye Quinn is an accomplished author and she’s clearly thought it through carefully. Ms Quinn also wrote the Singularity Series which I enjoyed and The Royals of Daria Series which I loved. Based on what I’ve read of hers, anything she writes is probably well worth reading.
One of the things I really like about this series (and indeed all her books) is the complexity and unpredictability of the plot. Many YA books that have simple plots and characters with fairly single minded concerns, but Zeph balances many different concerns, makes difficult choices and plays a tricky game where we wonder if he knows what he’s doing or if the risks are worth it.
This excerpt from the blurb will give you an idea of the story.
“Passing for a reader is something Zeph does well, but when readers start changing into jackers and his family disappears, Zeph must return to a city filled with jackers who hate him, trick a mindware CEO into helping him, avoid a girl who knows him too well, and spy on the most powerful jacker in the state. All without dying or revealing his abilities—or being caught in the firestorm of hate between jackers and readers that’s threatening to pull the world apart.”
The characters are all complex and interesting, and the book is superbly written and well-edited. In book five the plot and the stakes ramp up even further, and it’s another great book. There is one more to come and I will get it when it comes out.
This is a series I highly recommend. 5 stars.
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