Wired & Amped
Wired, Books #1 &2
By Douglas E Richard
ISBN #’s 0982618492 & 0985350318
Author site link: http://www.douglaserichards.com/
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Verushka
Review:
Wired hits the ground running taking us and Desh into Kira Miller’s world at full speed. Originally tasked with finding her, things change drastically when Desh finds out that nothing is what it seems about her or the men who hired him to find her.
Desh is a soldier who has left the army behind when he finds himself trying to find Kira. She is a scientist, a genius who has discovered a way to increase a human being’s intelligence immensely, but that does not come without consequences; something which scares her immensely.
Of the two, Kira is more fascinating to me. She is cool, calm and logical through the novel and just as capable as Desh is. Her intelligence is in all honesty intimidating, but she isn’t shy about showing her emotion when the occasion calls for it. Richards handles these two parts of her skillfully.
In essence, this is a game of cat and mouse, or Sherlock and Moriarty (as the book terms is), but the premise and the science that wraps a familiar story in something new. The desire to be better, cleverer or to live longer (I might have mentioned Kira is a genius) is something anyone can understand. Who wouldn’t want to know and do, well basically everything, or live for ages longer? But along with this question, the book highlights the consequences of such desires as well.
In Amped, the second novel in this series, Kira and Desh are forced to question everything they thought they knew about each other, while trying to fend off the government and another adversary. Richards is as every bit a competent writer as he was in Wired, and as a second novel, it is a worthy sequel. But, I confess, that by the time I started reading this, I found the science less attractive than I did in the first book.
Richards is an excellent writer, who has created interesting, relatable characters who are dealing with pretty mind-blowing (to me) scientific concepts that made me think about things I hadn’t before.
