Rach's Reading Club 2024

No One There

For my second book of January, I read No One There by Ava Strong. It was a good book, but not exactly what I was hoping for.

It's promoted as the first book in a series about an FBI agent named Sophia Blake. She is apparently an expert in languages and in this book, she is assigned a case involving serial killer at the Mexican-American festival of Dia de Los Muertos. The killer leaves each body with a model skull that has Aztec writing engraved on it.

This was an intriguing premise and I guess I was hoping that the plot would involve cerebral twists in which Blake had to unravel the code of those writings.

In reality, it's mostly an action story, albeit a good one. There are quite a few suspenseful scenes. At one point, her partner even engages in an underground boxing match. Then there's another scene where they both have to run from a bull.

I also noticed that the very last scene in the book seems more like something you would put towards the beginning. It's a scene where Sophia is at home and we learn that her house is filled with all kinds of souvenirs from her travels to foreign countries where they speak unusual languages. I kind of got the feeling that the author was introducing the character to the reader-- even though we'd already seen her-- for the sequals.

This first book is available for free on Google Books. (Would you think of less of me if I told you that was another reason I picked it?) But the subsequent books in the series all cost money, so I'm not sure if I'm willing to buy them.