Imagine someone can erase an event that just happened and replace it with a timeline of their own choosing. It's not a large change, just thirty seconds or so, but enough to alter an event irrevocably: prevent a death, avoid a glance, save your own skin. But what if it cost you immeasurably, by losing sometimes large pieces of memory? Those thirty seconds might cost you three weeks, three months, or three years. Now imagine that there's someone there beside you meant to keep you anchored and aimed, but they're corrupt?

That's Peri Reed. She's just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, and uncover a conspiracy of corruption, while losing pieces of her own memory to do it. It's James Bond with a serious supernatural power and some big-time drawbacks.

I've been reading this off and on for a week or so, and I think when I realized that this book was really good was when I was working on a project yesterday and I had a little niggle at the back of my head about a TV show I thought I'd been watching and wanted to see more of, but just couldn't remember what it was, and I suddenly remembered that it wasn't a TV show at all, it was The Drafter and I'd be able to go back to reading it when I was finished. Yep. ( )

I liked how in the end, she didn’t end up with one of the guys. ( )

On the whole, it's a pretty readable book -- time travel, memory displacement -- it's an interesting and fast paced world, with an interesting and fast paced plot and a whole lot of unanswered questions. I even found the characters to be relatively appealing, despite a whole lot of drama. The things that fall apart for me are:

1: Peri is supposed to be a badass fighting machine. She badly injured/killed in almost every fight she's in in the book. And she's kinda stupid at setting up those fights, when she gets a chance. If you are tiny and feisty, you have to be smart about this kind of thing. She's not and it's deeply irritating.

2: And the ending. That part when Opti raids the Alliance and suddenly because they raid the Alliance, they lose the game because all the proof is suddenly there? What? I really could not understand how that plot point was supposed to work, but at that point I kinda didn't care, because I just wanted to be done with the book already. So not reading a sequel. Time travel is not my thing, and these characters weren't likeable enough to deal with the rest of it. ( )

I have set this one aside. I have absolutely no desire to know what will happen with Peri. Maybe I wil read it again in the future but for now I have other books I do want to read.

decent thriller ( )