Tigerpetal Press : Book Review: August

Conspiracy 365 Book 8: August by Gabrielle Lord

I liked it

Book 8, and Cal is in yet another life-threatening situation, this time with the police involved! How will he avoid capture this time?

Read: January 20 – January 21, 2024

Genre: Action/Adventure
Audience: Teen; Young Adult
Book contains: conspiracy, on the run, nightmares, death, attempted murder, kidnapping, implied child death

Purchase a copy from Amazon.ca

The Cops Really Get on My Nerves

Cal Ormond has just been buried alive and his only escape is to be saved by the cops. When he wakes in a secure hospital, he finds out that his sister has been kidnapped, and they think he did it! Not only has he lost everything to Oriana de la Force, but now he has to get away from the police and find Gabbi before it’s too late—because it sure looks like the police won’t be any help in getting her back.

The first thing I have to say is how much I’m annoyed by the adults in this book. The cops are painted as such imbeciles, eating up all the false evidence that Cal is the bad guy. It’s also super annoying that his mom keeps hinting that something happened to make her believe that he would go crazy one day, but when he confronts her about the twin theory, she completely clams up. I mean, surely she’d know, right? And she’d think that a twin brother would be an important piece of information? Well, I guess it’s not very believable if they’ve been living in the same city their whole lives and haven’t known about one another; like, how is this double that Cal keeps seeing not on the police’s radar?

Moving on from my rant, I’ll say I once again read this book as usual. I was surprised, actually, that this book is only 179 pages, whereas all seven of the other books so far have been exactly 192 pages. It’s interesting!

As mentioned, this book had fewer pages than the other books, but the overall structure, point of view, and tense of the book were all the same as the previous ones.

Cal once again teams up with Winter and Boges, but first, he’s captured and questioned by the police. His uncle and mom even show up to question him about Gabbi. After escaping custody with the help of someone new, Cal gains a new world of contacts as he searches for the real kidnappers who took his sister.

It’s nice that Cal, Boges, and Winter are all tight now. There’s a new level of trust that has been forged, and even without the information that’s been taken by Oriana, I’m sure they’ll still be able to figure out the mystery. (Though I can think of several ways they could’ve done things differently. The suffering of hindsight…)

I’m disappointed to say that there are way more technical mistakes in this book than the others. I counted at least three typos in this novella (throught; bought instead of brought; etc.) and every time a plural was made possessive, a double quotation mark was used instead of an apostrophe (nurses” instead of nurses’). These things won’t bother the average reader, but as an editor and a reader, it stung me.

The tension and urgency are hyped in his book due to the disappearance of Cal’s little sister, but after his escape from the police, there isn’t much action nor near-misses until the very end. He’s overall quite safe in this book, but the pacing is still quite speedy, skipping over all unnecessary parts and delving straight into the clues that tie directly into the ongoing mysteries.

Still a great series to thrill seekers, preteen and teen boys who like action and mysteries, and for overall mystery lovers.

Conspiracy 365 Book 8: August by Gabrielle Lord

The Cops Really Get on My Nerves

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