Doomed by Tracy Deebs
Synopsis:
Pandora’s just your average teen-glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends-until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father-her one key to saving the world as we know it.
Review:
Set in modern day, Pandora doesn’t want to be just “one of the crowd.” She has been warned by her mother not to have any contact with her father, but when her mother forgets her birthday, Pandora opens an email from her father… and unleashes a literal countdown to doomsday. Stepbrothers Eli and Theo provide assistance in the game, in just staying alive, and a steamy love triangle.
First in a new series, this is an exciting, fast-paced thriller. Fans of apocalypse fiction and gamers will enjoy this fresh story where the power goes out with a race against the clock. It sounds a bit like the TV show Revolution, but only to the point where the world loses power. Doomed is a fun mix of mystery, gaming, mild (almost believable) science fiction, adventure and romance. This, thankfully, doesn’t leave off on a cliffhanger, like so many other series debuts. Instead, it works well as a standalone, yet with plenty of promise for an upcoming series.