Dark Mind Rising is a good crime story for sci-fi fans who like a little extra

Know a sci-fi fan that doesn’t mind quite a bit of genre crossover in their reading material? Then Dark Mind Rising might be a good choice.

Science fiction can make a great basis for telling all kinds of different stories. Take your standard love triangle, for instance, then throw it against a backdrop of dazzling technology, and you have a suddenly much more interesting idea. Granted, Julia Keller’s Dark Mind Rising isn’t so much going straight for a love triangle so much as skirting around it, but in a book where the conceit lies in the idea of using emotions as control (and what happens when that power falls into the wrong hands), it’s hard not to have that sort of thing creep in.

Now, to be fair to Keller, she is writing a YA book, and though romance isn’t always expected, it seems like it creeps in to a different degree. Props to her for not going directly at it, but at the same time, with Violet clearly having feelings for someone not named Kendall and Kendall having feelings for Violet, and those feelings all getting horribly jumbled up in the main plot of the story, which involves someone using what’s left of the Intercept (the aforementioned emotion-controlling technology), it’s hard not to see where the third book is probably going to go.

Indeed, the story itself is actually quite good — almost like one of J.D. Robb’s In Death books, but with way less graphic content of any kind — in the sense that you do get intrigued by how the Intercept could be back and how it’s being used to kill. (Indeed, Keller writes chapters from the perspective of each of the victims, so the comparison is valid.)

But where Robb usually has some snappy and at times darkly lovely writing, Keller’s is a bit clumsier by comparison, as if she’s still not quite sure how to write from the perspective of a teenager all the time. (She writes adult books as well.) To be fair, Violet is by no means what we’d think of as a normal teenager, as she’s running her own detective agency, however badly, at the tender age of 18, and she has a lawyer who’s 11. But there’s something almost off-balance in how Violet’s perspective comes through, and how others’ views of the same situation seem to invade for just a moment, to the point where some readers might not enjoy it quite so much. Keller also takes time to explain things over from the first book, and while that’s not uncommon to help readers refresh their memories, it occasionally takes just a little too long.

However, this idea of the Intercept is good enough to make it somewhat easier to look past these issues in execution. It might not be the greatest YA sci-fi book this year, but it’s certainly not the worst either, and for a sci-fi fan, it’ll help keep you into the genre while you wait for another, possibly shinier, title.