manda-rae reads a lot: Dark Eyes by William Richter

Friday, July 13, 2012

Dark Eyes by William Richter

Genre: YA Thriller/Mystery

Dark Eyes Series, Book 1

Description (taken from Goodreads):

Get ready for the vigilante girl detective of the next generation.

Wally was adopted from a Russian orphanage as a child and grew up in a wealthy New York City family. At fifteen, her obsessive need to rebel led her to life on the streets.

Now the sixteen-year-old is beautiful and hardened, and shes just stumbled across the possibility of discovering who she really is. She’ll stop at nothing to find her birth mother before Klesko—her darkeyed father—finds her. Because Klesko will stop at nothing to reclaim the fortune Wally’s mother stole from him long ago. Even if that means murdering his own blood. But Wally's had her own killer training, and she's hungry for justice.

Picking up this book, I had very little idea of what I was getting myself into. A thriller type novel that was receiving rave reviews. But I knew very little about it. This book is set in the 'real' world. So nothing paranormal, however it is high in the mystery and thriller levels.

Wally is a girl who moved from a Russian orphanage to a loving American home. But the transition left her lacking. She never fully understood who she was, where she came from, etc. And becoming a teenager just kind of helped things spiral out of control. Renouncing everything she knows, including her adoptive mother, she leaves her home to live on the streets. And there's a lovely event that kind of pulls the trigger and forces her to look up her birth mother and the past surrounding it.

There was a lot of mystery in this book. And everything ties together really well. However, I don't know if I ever had a chance to click with Wally. The third person from multiple points of view was hard for me to follow. And towards the end of the book, I felt like I was in a boat that was getting hit with wave after wave with no sense of direction as to where I was going. Is this a bad thing? No, it's not. I just think it was a little more action than I was expecting.

I recommend this book to all the thrill-seekers out there. Or all the amateur detectives looking for a good mystery. The best thing I can relate this book to is a really good action movie that leaves you guessing and anticipating the next move.