Book 16 of My 2014 Goal

Off The Grid by Dan Kolbet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just the cover alone of "Off The Grid" by Dan Kolbet sparked my interest with that power tower there among the stars. It had sort of an eerie glow behind the tower yet darkness all around. I figured this had to be a story about being cut off from power (by the name and cover picture) and after reading the authors description I found that the book was about much more than I thought it was. It is about murder, revenge, spying, love, and more.

I won't go into a long description of what the story is about but I will say it is about wireless electricity. I thought the characters were well developed in the book. The main character, who is named Luke, I wasn't even sure what company he was really working for. There are so many twists and turns as this story plays out, just when I think I figured him out something else would happen and I was back to not really knowing until the end. Then again, he wasn't the only one as there was another character who I thought was on one side but turns out was on another, plus there is one I still was not sure where she stood other than by her actions toward the end. In other words, don't think the first impressions or motives of all the characters are correct when you first start reading it. They may not be going where you think they are.

I did find some of the story slow in parts but this was mainly for either character building or to 'set up' for another twist in the story. (I also should just tell you that I was sick when I read this so I did put it down between readings which tends to 'lose' something. Maybe if I had read it daily or in one sitting, these slow parts weren't as slow as I think they were but thought it only fair to mention what *I* felt.) But even so, this story did have me wanting to know what happened next.

I am looking at this as a fictional story which is what the author intended, I am not trying to apply this to real life so as long as you don't do that, it is a great story. By this I mean, as I told you it is about wireless electricity and I was not concerned about the effects this 'wireless electricity' had on humans or animals; how it can be transmitted wireless without electrocuting anyone/anything nearby or why those 'off the grid' didn't use wind power or other types of energy not requiring fossil fuels. I just took the story at face value and assumed there was a reason but it wasn't 'vital' to this story so it was left out as to not complicate the story the author intended to tell.

There were some errors I noticed that weren't picked up by the proofreading. Examples of this are; "Luke knew there was much more the he..", "Using the prongs of ring she wore..." (missing the word 'the' in 'Using the prongs of the ring she wore...). There were also some punctuation errors but none of this was so serious that it took away from the story, to me at least.

I thought this was a good story and enjoyed reading it. I especially loved the ending (it gave me great satisfaction) the way it was done. I recommend this book to those who are tired of reading about the zombies and want a fiction, thriller, mystery that is quite different from the norm.


View all my reviews