I really enjoyed this storyline. Cool in a slightly “Black Mirror” way. And then i looked at the Sales Flyers in the paper, and saw how everyone had huge sales on Echoes and other smart technology, and then I started to get slightly freaked out by my smart watch... eek. ( )

THE MANSION is Ezekiel Boone's new book after fabulous The Hatching trilogy. This book is something else completely. It's a story about an old crumbling mansion and a love story that will destroy a friendship and turn two men into bitter enemies.

Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford were once a great team, but Shawn's girlfriend Emily left him for Billy. Shawn, however, ended up with the innovative computer Eagle Logic that he and Billy had created together. So, while Billy and Emily had each other, Shawn ends up one of the richest men on the planet.

READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW OVER AT FRESH FICTION! ( )

THE MANSION is Ezekiel Boone's new book after fabulous The Hatching trilogy. This book is something else completely. It's a story about an old crumbling mansion and a love story that will destroy a friendship and turn two men into bitter enemies.

Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford were once a great team, but Shawn's girlfriend Emily left him for Billy. Shawn, however, ended up with the innovative computer Eagle Logic that he and Billy had created together. So, while Billy and Emily had each other, Shawn ends up one of the richest men on the planet.

READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW OVER AT FRESH FICTION! ( )

I received an ARC from Netgalley #netgalley for an honest review of this book. This is a great book. I can see it being made into a movie. Shawn and Billy fought over a girl, Emily. Billy won but Shawn is a billionaire and still has a spot in his heart for Emily. He and Billy made a computer assistant, Nellie, to care for your every need. Billy just needs to get it running and get the bugs out. He and Emily go back to where it all began, Whiskey Run. Unfortunately, Nellie doesn’t like competition. ( )

EDIT: OK, 6 months later I still think about and shudder over the scene where Billy digs into his arm, and I can tell I will continue to do so, so I'm bumping my rating up to 5 stars.

A perfectly adequate, fun, haunted house/possession/AI gone wrong story. Some nice nods to The Shining which didn't actually go anywhere: what, really, is the point of the twins? They creep out their mom and talk to the house, but they don't actually really do anything., and a truly horrific scene that stuck with me for days.

Billy, Shane, and Emily have a complicated history: Billy and Shane holed themselves up for two years after college to work on the next big thing in computing, but once Emily drops out of college to join the picture, it all falls apart. Billy leaves with Emily, and Shane leaves with the company. Now, a decade later, Billy's gone to rehab and he and Emily are struggling financially while Shane has become the new tech mogul of the world. But Shane has almost accomplished what he and Billy set out to do all those years ago, and needs Billy's help to cross the final obstacle.

Nellie is a smart house: not an AI but a computer system devoted to you and making you happy. But once both Shane and Billy spend more time in the house, a complication occurs: both men are in love with Emily.

There are a few extraneous characters (Shane's assistant Alice, who's only around to be hot and endlessly say she's not sleeping with Shane and for Nellie to act weird around), and this could easily be a bottle novel: it takes too long for the three main characters to finally be in the same place for a prolonged period of time.

There's some interesting recursive elements that, again, go nowhere. Like how Billy is sober for 23 months when he meets Shane again, how that's the amount of time they spent in the cabin, and how that's how long Shane's dad was sober until he fell off the wagon and killed Shane's mother. But since Billy doesn't actually move in till later, it's longer than 23 months and he escapes the cycle of violence. Or how both Emily and Beth share similarities with Shane's mother and aunt [Ethel?) and Bev], and how both E women were married to drunks who they refused to leave. An interesting statement could have been made about familial violence and the cyclical nature of abuse, even with Billy escaping it, but it's never really mentioned.

And while I appreciate that we get the perspective of all three main characters, I didn't really mind that they were pretty indistinguishable until it came to Emily. There was nothing there to convince me that she had these two men deeply in love with her, and she was always just unhappy and passive.

A little too long and too slow, but once it picks up it's entertaining. ( )