A Near-Future YA/Cozy Mystery
with A Somewhat Predictable End
Set one hundred years in the future, Repository
is the story of Maya Bell, an eighteen-year-old university student who stumbles
across an apparent murder. Teaming with a
classmate from high school who’s now a policeman-in-training, Damien Cain, they
pursue the case as it grows from an isolated incident to a major conspiracy
built on a heinous disregard of life.
Repository has the feel
of a young adult or cozy mystery even if it’s not classified that way (it’s in
the Mystery/Thriller, women and amateur sleuth genre on Amazon). That feel suits the story well, as much of
the excitement comes from the optimism and enthusiasm of youth. Why call in backup or carefully stake out a
potential crime scene when you can rush in unprepared? But that feel also dampens some of the
emotion when its needed. On discovering
the atrocious nature of the crime they were investigating, the comment was that
it’s “…horrible and really disgusting.”
Maya was easy to like as the over-achieving, guilt-ridden student turned
sleuth. And other than the immaturity
that seemed extreme in places, Damien was as well. Pacing was good, although there seemed some
unnecessary repetition. Overall, the
plot was somewhat predictable; it was fairly clear from about the middle of the
book what was happening and how it would end.
The details getting there, of course, were unknown and the author does
an admirable job keeping the reader immersed to the end.
As a story set one-hundred years in the future, Repository provided a somewhat ‘mixed bag’ of future
technology. One gadget that was featured
was wearable computing in the form of glasses – a tech novelty that may have
already come and gone. And a lot of the
technology seemed 2017 era – emails and dishwashers – or not as far along as
you might expect, e.g., androids could be distinguished from humans because of their
unsynchronized lip movement. In 100
years, really? But there were androids
and an Artificial Intelligence with a personality chip, the latter being a lot
of fun.
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