Virtual Evil by Jana Oliver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In Virtual Evil, the story picks up a few weeks after the end of the first book. Jack the Ripper is still at large, but has stopped killing for now. The anarchists' plot was interrupted, but their threat is more real than ever, and not as simple as it seems. John Keats is badly injured and now an anarchist target. Alastair is grumpy, over-protective and having career troubles, and Cynda is still at the heart of dangerous events, unable to return to her time before the mess of 1888 is fixed. In this state of affairs, it takes a while for the new plot to get moving, but once it does it's hard to stop reading.
The mess in 1888 only gets worse. Cynda thinks she has solved part of the mystery surrounding another Rover's death, but now the mystery only gets deeper and deeper, and those who have helped her find themselves in serious trouble. Everything that happens adds to the chaos, and the question hovers over it all - why is this time period being tampered with and by whom?
This is quite a long novel with lots of new questions and new dangers, but very few answers. It's almost boring at first, but all the questions just keep building until you realize there's no way that you're going to get answers at the end of the book and it's hard to hold them all in your head.
This time by the end, Cynda's blind bumbling around turns to disaster since she simply doesn't have the pieces necessary to make headway against enemy unknown, and we are left with cliffhangers - plural. There are no resolutions, no discoveries that solve this cross-time puzzle. The tension that builds in the last 100 pages or so begs for relief that can only be found in the third book that it was all leading up to. This is more than just someone being left hanging in a bad situation that you have to read on to see what happens. This is a huge, unresolved tangle that will take another 450 pages to solve. I have to say I'm eager to discover what comes of it all and I can't seem to stop trying to sort it out in my head.
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