DON'T LOOK NOW

Hackers Noa and Peter step up their undercover battles against pharmaceutical giant Pike & Dolan as danger escalates for them both (Don’t Turn Around, 2012).

Pike & Dolan continue Project Persephone, their secret and deadly research ostensibly to end the PEMA epidemic striking teens across the country, despite having one of their labs exposed to the authorities by the teens. Peter has stayed with his parents in Boston even after discovering their involvement with P&D, while Noa has joined the Southwest-based Persefone’s Army, made up of freed subjects of P&D’s labs working to liberate others before they’re killed. Peter helps Noa via a secret chat group online while worrying that his ex-girlfriend Amanda might have contracted the always-fatal PEMA. Noa deals with internal problems within the army as she plans their next mission. In an attempt to find the new servers for P&D’s main computers, Peter increases his surveillance of Mason, a ruthless P&D agent, only to be drawn into Mason’s plotting; meanwhile, Noa grows suspicious of new recruits to her cause. Gagnon’s second in the Don’t Turn Around trilogy inches the tale forward with a few thrills concentrated at the volume’s close, but she spends far too much time examining from every side the various love triangles and quadrangles among its characters. Here’s hoping the finale will be a return to the thrills and surprises of the first installment and not more love among the hackers.

Worth it to get fans from here to there; not of much interest as a stand-alone.