Shattered

     Shattered is a Psychological Thriller by Shelby K. Morrison. 

     If I can say one thing; if Mrs. Morrison never makes it as an author, she could make a fortune writing hooks for other authors.  This book grabs you right from the start, and you flip through the pages as fast as you can to see what the heck is going on!  The first several chapters are a "hook", and I have to say that Mrs. Morrison really knows how to get a reader to turn the page.

     Alex, the protagonist, kills a man.  It's not as bad as you think.  She stops a robbery, and in the process stabs the robber to death.  She is let off because it was self-defense, but a gnawing feeling that she should be punished for ending someone's life won't leave her alone.  Brooding, she sees her reflection in a mirror in her apartment, and in disgust, she throws a chair at the mirror.  With the breaking of the glass her world is "shattered". 

     Suddenly, Alex doesn't exist.  She's on a island, in some sort of government-owned facility.  She has no clue as to how she got there, or at what point her life was somehow altered.  She escapes the facility and tries to recover her life.  The only problem is, the life she knew doesn't exist!  Either she's crazy, or there is a government conspiracy.  She gets help from a group who believe the latter.

     An extremely convoluted plot begins to unfold.  Someone has gone to great lengths to cover up Alex's existence.  As she, Ian, and William, her conspiracy theorist friends and saviors, track down the clues, they are ever-pursued by men in black SUV's.  The action keeps you on the edge of your seat through the whole novel.  Alex is never left alone for very long, and her pursuers are always nipping at her heels.  What's worse, it seems her father is tied up in the whole mess, and she has to find a way to save him, too.  However, he might not need "saving."  There are others close to her, that she finds she needs to save instead.

     I pride myself on being able to guess the twist endings in books and movies, but I have to admit that I didn't see this one coming.  It ended so differently than what I thought.  I was impressed. 

     In all, I rather enjoyed this novel.  Mrs. Morrison really has a way of keeping you interested.  If I were to be picky, I would say that the italicized thoughts were fairly distracting.  I never quite understood why editors and publishers disliked omniscient voice in writing until now.  It is very hard to pull off.  On the one hand, Mrs. Morrison was able to quickly give the audience an insight into the characters reactions without interrupting the fast pace of the novel, but on the other hand the characters all seemed to have the same personality when their "thoughts" were expressed.  I don't know how she could have done it better, except to sit down and write different speech patterns and expressions for the different characters so that they would each be unique.  

     Alex was also a little inconsistent, but that may have been done on purpose considering what the government had done to her.  She switches from kickboxing macho woman, to scared timid girl, to chummy spy trying to charm information out of people.  Towards the end of the book, you learn that she has lost the ability to feel certain emotions (I hate to say even that much because I don't want to give away any spoilers), so she could be inconsistent in her behavior because of that, but I tend to think that her character development just needed a little more tweaking to make her more of a real person to the reader.

     The only other criticism I could give is the narration could be a little more proper.  It's okay for a character to say "till" or "cause", but I believe the narrator should say the whole words to add a level of sophistication to the story.  

     In all I would give the novel