The Unbroken Line by Case Lane (The Life Online Files; 2)

The Synopsis:

What if your last text triggered the next world war?
In the near future, the dead live on as virtual holograms interacting with humans through an omnipresent cyber Network. In Washington, DC, heartbroken U.S. President Arturo Solar is recklessly communicating with an illegal copy of his dead daughter’s digital conscience – arguing with her preserved memories about his global policies.
Days later, terrifying, undetectable drones appear in The Philippines, Brazil, and outer space, and lethally disrupt the President’s global agenda. Militaries are left defense-less against the advanced machines capable of targeting and disarming any perceived threat. To his shock, Solar uncovers a connection no one else can see, and scrambles to rally humanity’s last known thinkers to save the world from inevitable war.
Kadie Laltanca, the brilliant, beautiful, no-nonsense Commander of UN Special Command, is called back to DC to find and fix an inconceivable cyber conflict. Kadie rallies a global team of technologists, intelligence agents and diplomats to search the world for clues to stopping the cyber glitch.
But without the help of rogue technologists, their greatest enemies and biggest rivals, global law enforcement may stand no chance on its own.
The team must risk the entire infrastructure of global cybersecurity to align with rogue techs and their unpredictable friends in the battle for survival. Criss-crossing the world from the Amazon rainforest to the heat of Cape Canaveral and the bitter winter cold in Moscow, The Unbroken Line is a thrilling future fiction international adventure from earth to outer space.
This is Book 2 in the unprecedented Life Online speculative science fiction thriller series about our battle to survive in the world we are now creating as we come to grips with the disturbing consequence of humanity’s dependence on programmed machines, and the visionary benefits of the technology. Each Life Online book can be read independently.

I received this book from the author for the purpose of this review. All comments and opinions are entirely my own.

Review:

In a world where all of humanity relies on the commands of an all powerful Network for every single task, self-thinkers are rare to find. Which means that when the Network glitches, only a small group of people, whether they get along or not, have the responsibility to find the problem and fix the code, before every country in the world engages in another World War.

I am an absolute sucker for futuristic tech novels and in my dreams, I’m working right alongside one of these highly secretive organizations with my superior intelligence and computer skills. But that’s obviously not how life truly is for me so I live out my dreams in books like this one; The Unbroken Line.

To begin, the story world is truly immaculate. It seems as if literally every aspect of this future has been thought of and carefully put into place and described. No question is left unanswered as far as how things work in this new world and I understood it virtually easily. However, there is a LOT packed into this book. It’s almost overwhelming and struck me as a bit of a flex on how much the author knows about computer programing. Yes everything is explained in ways that the reader can comprehend, but you had better be interested in computers if you don’t want your eyes to glaze over.

As far as characters and the story itself, I honestly think there were too many perspectives of the same story. We watched the progress of solving the glitch from the perspective of the White House, and 3-4 different characters within Special Command, and the Russians, and a rouge tech named Zylen Blain. It was just too much rereading the same progress with too little variation of the perspectives. Only one, very minor, detail would be new from perspective to perspective so it caused the book to drag on and on, taking away from its thrill and suspense. Another thing that made it seem as if it would never end, was the fact that this 412 page novel only has 6 chapters! Yikes!

Overall I liked the storyline and it was certainly an engaging and enthralling read. I just felt like it would have been far more suspenseful and likeable if it hadn’t dragged on as long as it did with the 7-8 different perspectives. I give it 3 out of 5 stars and recommend it only to fans of cyber tech suspense.

There is a decent amount of cursing present and some sexual content. No sex scenes are present though there are mentions of characters sleeping together and being naked together, as well as some brief kissing scenes.