REVIEW: Code Runner by Rosie Claverton
Dear Rosie Claverton:
I read your debut Amy Lane mystery, and as soon as I was done I went to Netgalley and requested the next installment for review. Life intervened for a couple of weeks, but when I had a spare hour I started reading Code Runner. As I anticipated given my experience with Binary Witness, I had high hopes for this novel and I wasn’t disappointed. Code Runner is a very strong followup to the first book and I am firmly hooked on the Amy and Jason chronicles.
A
my Lane, computer hacker and agoraphobe, and Jason Carr, ex-con and cleaner/assistant, have settled into a comfortable relationship. Amy’s house and person are well cared for and Jason is enjoying having a proper job. But their new case puts Amy, Jason, and any number of other people close to them in danger, with several characters’ past and present lives colliding.
Unlike the mystery in the first book, this one finds Jason at the heart of the crimes, and even though he is a more or less innocent bystander, his ex-con background makes him an obvious suspect and he winds up back where he hoped never again to be: in prison, meeting old friends and enemies. As a result, the reader spends a lot of time with Jason, and Amy and Jason spend quite a bit of time apart. Jason engages in some behavior that verges on TSTL, although we can understand his motives. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think that the actions that got him into trouble are *exactly* the kind of thing for which a heroine gets a ton of grief from readers. So I was glad to see that he had to pay the price, however painful it was to watch those consequences unfold.
I don’t want to say too much about the mystery plot because it’s hard to describe without giving away spoilers. I enjoyed it quite a bit, I didn’t guess the full story until almost the end, and I thought the pacing and overall development of the mystery arc was more successful than in the previous novel. The criminals and victims include present and former friends and associates of Jason as well as members of the police force, and we get to know more about Cardiff detectives Bryn and Owain, Jason’s sister Cerys, and Amy’s sister Lizzie.
The relationship between Amy and Jason continues to develop, and in this installment we get hints that each might be feeling more than friendship for the other. Nothing explicit happens, but in spite of that (or perhaps because of it), the few, fleeting moments when they share a sense of something that might happen between them are quite powerful. I hope Claverton doesn’t rush the relationship, because I love the way each is learning more about the other, and the dry, understated humor that often accompanies their observations provides a bit of relief from the ugly stuff. And I get a kick out of the role reversals:
Jason was cleaning the oven. Amy had learned swiftly that if Jason was cleaning the oven, elbow-deep in grease and melted cheese, he was incredibly pissed off. The first time had been the trashy tabloid article where some so-called journalist had scraped together every flimsy piece of “evidence” he could find and concluded that Jason was a dangerous criminal who police had pardoned to bring vigilante justice back to the streets. They’d quoted liberally from a number of anonymous sources—who refused to be named for their safety.
When Owain had apologetically drawn their attention to it, Jason hadn’t said a word. He had just retreated to the kitchen and scoured the oven from top to bottom for two hours. Meanwhile, Amy had launched a DDoS attack, exploiting an old botnet from her blackhat days to flood the tabloid’s antiquated servers with corrupt code. The site had been down for over twenty-four hours, and the creaking old system had never fully recovered. It had been exceedingly satisfying.
At the same time, though, I’m enjoying the possibility of seeing more romance develop over the course of the series.
As in the previous installment, the sense of place is effectively developed; this isn’t a story that could take place anywhere, but rather it is firmly rooted in its context. We travel outside Cardiff to the countryside and to the coast, and the different locations play critical roles in the story. The book is atmospheric without drawing attention to itself. The writing is still a bit rough in patches, but it suits Jason and several other characters’ relatively rough backgrounds and even Amy’s lack of social acumen.
There are no easy fixes for the difficulties the characters face. Amy is still agoraphobic, and although she takes a big step forward, there’s no guarantee she won’t retreat again. Jason’s past continues to shape his present and future despite his efforts to overcome the hurdles it creates. Code Runner provides the next step in the classic path that a good mystery series takes, and my biggest regret when I finished was that I don’t know when the next installment is due. At this point Amy, Jason, Cerys, Bryn, and Owen feel pretty real to me and I want to spend more time with them. Grade: B+
P.S. I don’t usually pay attention to covers, but wow, did you ever win the lottery on yours. I’d buy print copies just to be able to display them.
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I loved Binary Witness as well and couldn’t wait for this to come out. Jason’s TSTL behavior was so frustrating, though, I had to set the book aside to finish another day.
This series sounds interesting and different. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I loved the first book. You are right about really getting a sense of Cardiff. Can’t wait to read this one.
I really liked the first book and am looking forward to this one. Right now, I’m on a Joanna Wylde glom but Code Runner will be next.
The covers are so distinctive. Totally made me check out Binary Witness. Hope Rose Claverton is a fast writer. :-)
Loved loved the first book, I have several review books to get through, but this one is waiting for me on my kindle. Great review :).
I picked up the first after seeing the review here, and then pre – ordered the second. I share your frustration upon googling the author and not finding any clue as to the future, if any instalments.
I liked the way Amy came about to be making that big step (and the how was pretty realistic!) and I have hopes that her anxiety disorder will continue to be responsibly depicted.
Seeing Jason be tstl was a bit toothgrindingly frustrating, but it is behaviour well grounded in character and the real world psychology of a bloke from that kind of background. I just wish more heroines had such convincing charactrisation for being daft
loved these too, looking forward to more
I liked Binary Witness and enjoyed the setting. Amy and Jason’s relationship was pretty adorable. Looking forward to reading this one, especially now with a rec tag.
Yeah. Claverton hit the jackpot with those covers. It was the cover that caught my eye back when the first book was released.
@Rebe: I can totally understand that. I groaned when I read it and then it nagged at me for a while. But he really does pay for his stupidity, and it feels motivated in terms of the kind of personality he has. He’s a person of action and he wants to redeem himself. Allison Godfrey had a really good summary of his personality on Twitter, noting that it’s important to him to prove his worth and for him that’s by using his connections (in the sense of going into his old neighborhoods). In this case he clearly did not think it through. So on the one hand, it was a big plot motivator, but on the other, I could see it as emanating from his personality.
@Janine: You’re welcome! I talked about the first book in a reading roundup post a few weeks ago. It was good but this is better.
@Sally W.: I love the sense of place Claverton gives us. It’s really woven into the story.
@Carolyn: I care almost nothing about covers (unless I want to put brown paper over them!) but these are just great. I hope you enjoy it!
@Sirius: I think you’ll really like this one.
@FD: Yes, if heroines had backstories that explained their TSTL behavior I’d find it a lot easier to take! I’m confident that Claverton will continue to portray Amy well. I’ve read a bit of her blog and the way she talks about psychiatric conditions and disability reveals both her expertise and her empathy. And these first two books demonstrate, to me at least, that she can communicate that in her fiction.
That said, I’d love to hear from people who have a more sophisticated knowledge of agoraphobia than I do.
@Susan: I’ll be all over the next one whenever it shows up, believe me.
@Kanoko: I hope you enjoy it!
@Sunita: Thanks. I was out of town when your reading roundup posted, so I missed it. I’m off to read it now.
I really liked “Binary Witness”. I actually think this is a huge testament to the author’s skills, given that she gets it wrong over and over again when she talks about anything related to computers/hacking. I am an IT person, and this kind of a book would normally be a DNF for me, given that computer forensics are front and center but the author cannot even get the basic terminology right. But Amy and Jason are such a compelling couple, I kept reading it. Hopefully “code runner” will still have the same magic.
@MD: I’m sorry to hear that the computer/hacking stuff is so off, but I have the same reaction about the bits that I find problematic. I just keep reading anyway. And I agree, it says a lot about the author’s skill at depicting relationships and setting.
I think you’ll like Code Runner. I can’t speak to the things that bothered you, but some of the things that bothered me in Binary Witness were much improved in this installment.
@Sunita: You were right, I liked “Code Runner”. The computer stuff is still really bad – I’ve gotten into quoting it on Facebook for laughs. My current favorite is “She had seen him fail to distinguish a terabyte from a memory stick”. But the characters are compelling enough that I kept turning the pages and enjoyed the book overall.
@MD: Oh, I’m so glad! And thanks for letting me know.
When I read that line (I remember it) I think I mentally added “drive” to “terabyte” and so it kind of made sense to me. ;)
@Sunita: Yes, I see ;-) This reminded me of “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” — this is a famous sentence used to teach linguistics students that it is possible to construct something that is completely grammatically (syntactically) correct but is complete nonsense semantically.
The thing is, while linguists agree that it is possible, in practice when people are presented with such nonsensical sentences, they often come up with added words or complex scenarios to make them “make sense”. Apparently, our brain hates seeing something that seems to have the right structure but does not “add up”, and so we (subconsciously) try hard to make it all work one way or another.
From my point of view, there were a lot of “colorless green ideas” sentences in those books ;-) Probably more so than to an average person just because I know in depth what various terms mean, so I have to work harder to construct the new meaning. But I also wonder if the really bad “surface” blunders in a way protect the book – when you think about it, most of what happens there is highly infeasible. If the book was slightly more researched on the surface, I wonder if I’d be more picky about the finer details, seeing as they are the core of the book. As it is, I just have to suspend my disbelief totally, and roll with it.
As I said before, I think this is the testament to the true skill of the author that she makes it possible for me to do that. In the same way as I generally do not like “Regency land” that use gowns as wallpaper and ignore (or are ignorant of) all historical reality; but every so often there is an author who will write characters compelling enough that I can read it as a fairy tale and never mind the things that would drive me crazy otherwise.
@MD: Oh, that makes total sense. It’s like the studies that show that you can leave out certain letters when writing words and your brain will insert them.
I have the same issue with historical and certain types of contextual material. Unless I’m really engrossed in the story I will nitpick constantly while I’m reading and never immerse myself. I agree that with Claverton, the characters somehow overcome the flaws. I made my husband read Binary Witness and he had all kinds of problems with it, but he went straight on to Code Runner. He had problems with that too, but he still enjoyed the read. She has a gift.