The Forbidden Game: The Hunter; The Chase; The KillThe bad and the neutral:
- Originally published in the 90s, LJ Smith went ahead and used some slang and details from the time period where more generic terms would have worked and made it feel less dated now. Still, how would she have known that all of these years later they'd be doing reprints of all of her books? So while it feels wrong now... eh... It worked when she wrote it.
- Yes, they do seem to be on a crazy spree, reprinting all of her books. Now we're all human. I expect us all to goof, especially me, I'm the queen of typos. But with editors and reprints and the like, it feels like somehow LJ Smith's books are the ones I read that always keep having silly errors even after multiple re-prints and a decade or more of people reading and re-reading them. Yet they never get caught / fixed in new versions? Things like: "But we got her back from him last time, Michael. We'll get HERE back now."
- You'll probably want to keep telling yourself "This is the omnibus version. This is three books, not one." Otherwise it'll feel really repetitive as you re-meet some of the characters over and over, their descriptions repeated almost word for word several times.
The good:
- Well that'd be one thing, the most important thing, the story itself. Jenny goes in search of a game for her boyfriend's birthday party. While trying to find the store she's followed by two shady looking men and stumbles into the the nearest door to escape them. A game store. Not the one she'd been looking for. Still, convenient... a little too convenient. Turns out she'd been led to the store by the boy who runs it, Julian. The game he sold her, it was real. Jenny and her friends become trapped in it. If they win, they get out and that is that. If they lose, Julian gets to keep Jenny. Along the way they'll all face their worst nightmares.
In typical LJ Smith fashion the villain is someone we end up rooting for. He's got to redeem himself. He's fun! So he's done some bad things, he couldn't help it, really. The good guys are so dull. They don't appreciate the girl! Etc. Usually, you're not supposed to hope the bad guy wins and get the girl in the end, but in LJ Smith's books, you do. So will he? That'd be telling...
