Rogue Justice by Stacey Abrams
This is the sequel to When Justice Sleeps, and it improves on the first in almost every way.
In the first book, I was a big fan of the overall plot. It was interesting & reasonably complex & that was the main thing that drove me to finish the book. I had some complaints about dialogue, cheesy things that just didn't work for me, and several style choices in the writing - mostly having to do with being excessively elaborate & using vocabulary that was too advanced.
This second book has the same main selling point - it has an interesting main plot. But the dialogue didn't feel off to me (I have no thoughtful notes on the dialogue in either book, really. Its just a vibes thing mainly), the cheesy chess metaphors were gone, and the writing style was much friendlier.
She still uses a strong vocabulary & some elaborate descriptions, but it was done in a way that didn't make me feel ignorant or uncertain of what she was trying to communicate. The high-level vocab was more spaced out & had better context clues. Though I'm still entirely lost on certain visual descriptions she gives, as she references things that are, I think, quite posh, like very specific styles of dress or something. There were many of these in the first book and very few in this second book.
I'm still ... so annoyed at the technology / hacking type stuff. Some of it is very plausible. And some of it is utter nonsense. (this problem, too, was worse in the first book) But one example from the second book is:
There's a room that was purpose-built to jam signals. Super valid, super legit, real thing. But then they reconfigured the room to only "distort" signals. The purpose of this was so that encrypted messages could be sent without being traceable. And this is utter garbage. It's not real. I'm not an expert in this space, I am a professional programmer, I am tech savvy & keep up with tech news. So there's a very small possibility I'm wrong here, but man no this was garbage.
If you distort a signal, it is no longer carrying the same information that it was carrying when you sent it (unless the receiver has a way to un-distort it, ig). She could have said that it was re-configured to re-route signals through remote VPN tunnels or something. It's a little unlikely (especially because of encryption), but it's much more plausible than distorting a signal.
The book was really good. I have strong feelings about technology representation in media, and so I'm basically always going to complain about it. I like complaining about it.
This book doesn't make my all-time favorites, but it is very good, and it is a strong recommend. The first book is a medium recommend, but you really should read it first anyway. The second book works without having read the first, but still, it's a sequel, yaknow?