Once they start Eden goes undercover, leaving Frank with her nothing to do but monitor her progress with a tech named Juno, and wait. However Eden’s father, Heinrich “Hades” Archer, has problems of his own, mainly a man from his distant past who claims that Hades ruined his life, and is taunting the aging but still dangerous semi-retired fixer into losing his temper and doing something that could ruin his life. So he drafts Frank to help him find solve his problems. At the same time there is another story-line about a young, nameless almost feral street-kid, set in the past, who is “adopted” by a criminal named Bear, and we follow his brutal and gripping tale as it provides us not only with a solid background, but dovetails neatly with the current story.
Reading Hades was like getting punched in the face, and Eden has the same impact, ouch! It’s not for the faint of heart; there are murderers, rapists, pedophiles, dog-fights, even a cannibal. Yet despite all of this, we start to see all of the main characters become full, well-rounded people, capable of kindness as well as savagery. Frank has always been kind of a gate-way into this world, and Hades becomes more understandable as his tale unwinds, but the real star of this book is Eden. She was fascinating in the first book, but here, as she goes undercover, Ms. Fox lets us see deep inside her main character. It’s been said that wearing a mask allows us to really show our true selves, and that cliche comes to life here. When Eden becomes Eadie, we start to see the living breathing person that exists inside of her cold and calculating surface. The scenes where Eden befriends and bonds with Jackie’s girlfriend Skylar, are a revelation, and provide moments of kindness and compassion that are all the more powerful as the plot reveals that nothing, and I mean nothing, is quite the way that it seems.
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July 2020
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