Review: King of Code

King of Code by C.D. Reiss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

C.D. Reiss is one of those authors I constantly see and mean to read. She has a huge following and so many people seem to enjoy her work. Due to this, I was intrigued to see whether I would fall into the fandom. Whilst there have been a few C.D. Reiss books that have sounded interesting to me, King of Code is the first book I have picked up.

I’ll be completely honesty by saying I’m not one hundred percent sure how I feel about this one. There were some parts of this book I liked and others parts I did not like. If I’m being completely honest, I disliked more than I liked. However, the parts that I did like worked to make up for it. Not enough for me to be crazy about this book, but enough for me to carry on reading it to the end and for me to be interested in reading more of the author’s work.

King of Code grabbed me because of the synopsis and the promise of hackers. When I think of hackers, I think of action packed books. It doesn’t need to be espionage style action – but I expect big things. Hackers in the fictional world are a lot of fun. Thus, I was quite disappointed when it took me a long time to feel as though something was happening in this book. In fact, I felt as though the book never did reach the big bang I’d been hoping for – I wanted a real punch when it came to the hacking action.

It is clear a lot of research went into the creation of this book, and I feel a though the need to share that knowledge resulted in the book wading through a lot of inaction. Information is constantly being thrown at us, rather than action moving us forward. I loved all the information given, the way it made the story feel real, yet it slowed the book down so much.

I think, however, my big issue is that I never came to enjoy the characters. With two hackers in the central roles, I should have loved them. Sadly, they both felt rather flat to me. There were some moments where I enjoyed them – towards the end of the book, they became more real, I even gave a couple of giggles at comments made – but they were never the solid characters I had hoped to be reading. Moreover, I simply could not bring myself to enjoy the interaction between the two of them. There was no chemistry from my point of view, making the romance feel overly dull. Perhaps if I’d liked the characters more, I would have enjoyed the story more than I did – as it was, I couldn’t connect with the characters as much as I had hoped.

Despite this, I thought the story was an interesting one. It wasn’t the action-filled novel I had expected, but there was something there to keep me reading. I was interested to see how everything played out, if nothing else.

Even though I wasn’t crazy about this one, I had enough interest to want to read more of the author’s work. I have other C.D. Reiss books on my Kindle that I will pick up at some point in the future, and it’s quite possible I will pick up the other books in this series. I’m curious to see how Queen of Rust plays out, interested in learning more about a certain character. White Knight also sound intriguing. I won’t be rushing to read them, but there is interest to be found.

Overall, this was an interesting introduction to C.D. Reiss. Although it didn’t convince me to dive deep into the fandom, it has certainly left me interested in reading more. There’s the possibility I will be convinced by future books, and I’m willing to take the journey to see.

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