If Run with the Hunted was a lighthearted heist story in the vein of Ocean’s 8, Ctrl Alt Delete is a buddy road trip story similar to Thelma and Louise, minus the sexual assault. The second book in the series manages to raise the stakes not by adding a third or fourth shady government agency, but by making the danger more personal and the path forward even less clear. I was genuinely so worried about Bits (the narrator of this story) and a new side character that I had to put the book down and take a break a couple of times.
An uncertain number of months after the diamond heist, Dolly pulls Bits out of VR immersion—and out of hiding—for a much more personal job. They need to steal Bristol back from the black site where she’s being held before the government realizes exactly who she is. It’s too complicated and dangerous a job for Dolly to do alone, but Bits is suffering from unexplained migraines, lost time, nose bleeds, memory loss, and a strange inability to even hear what happened between the diamond heist and Bristol’s arrest.
Like the first book in the series, Ctrl Alt Delete is fast paced and short enough to read in an afternoon—assuming you don’t have to take breaks because of how worried you are about the characters. I liked getting to know Bits and Dolly (my love! who gets significantly more screen time in this book than the last) more intimately, and I loved the way that new knowledge fills in little gaps and recontextualizes information from the first book. Really, though, the strength of this series is in the relationships between its main cast, and watching Dolly take care of Bits while she recovered made me fall so hard for these women all over again. My only complaint is I wanted it to be at least 20% longer.
Fans of book one will not be disappointed, but I’d recommend book two particularly to fans of found family stories, VR hacking stories, conspiracy theories, and badass women who can easily carry you up and twelve tons of firearms up six flights of stairs while chain smoking and not break a sweat. Now, where is my Dolly book????
Click here to read my review of Run With the Hunted 3: Standard Operating Procedure.
More Info
Publisher: Self-published
Paperback Page Count: 156
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