I found this book to be a reasonably fun and quick read, although I liked some parts better than others. The book switches between two main point-of-view characters. One character is Lara, the heroine of the story. She’s a paramedic who used to be a police officer and she’s a contestant in a televised competition called the Gauntlet. This was the part of the story I enjoyed the most. Sometimes it seemed like Lara was too good at everything to be believable, but I liked her pretty well. Her part of the story always held my interest and I enjoyed reading it.

The other character was Paul, a government employee. At first his story doesn’t seem to have any relation to Lara’s. But anybody who’s read more than a handful of books in their lifetime knows that two seemingly-unrelated stories will almost always converge by the end. So it was pretty obvious from the outset how Paul was going to fit into the story, simply because there weren’t that many other possible connections to make. The predictability wasn’t the main problem for me, though. My problem was that I didn’t like Paul and I didn’t particularly enjoy reading about him. His priorities were horrible, his motives were shallow, and his decisions were dumb. There were mitigating circumstances, and perhaps we were expected to sympathize with him or at least understand him, but I just couldn’t do it. ( )