The Iris Code: A Tracker Novel ~ eBook Review

 

THE IRIS CODE

A Tracker Novel

by

Anita Dickason

Suspense / Mystery / Thriller

318 pages

Publication Date: June 17, 2024

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FROM THE TBR PILE. This author's one of my favorites, and I adore her Tori Winters series, which I just recently (finally) reviewed on my blog. But though I had the honor of helping Anita Dickason promote her Tracker novels over the years, I had never had a chance to read one of them. (The irony of the bookish job from which I have now retired, is that I rarely got to read books.) When THE IRIS CODE published last summer, I immediately bought it on Kindle, and there it had sat until this week. Looks like I'll have a new series to binge. Good thing I'm retired. Read on...

ABOUT THE BOOK: A local reporter and photographer’s canine search and rescue training at an abandoned farm outside of Fredericksburg, Texas, takes a bizarre twist. Riley Phillips’ dog, Milo, alerts on the real deal—a corpse with a bullet hole in his head.

Riley’s nose for news is already twitching over the gruesome discovery. When the body turns up missing, her spider senses kick into overdrive. Who doesn’t want the man identified, and why? Are her crime scene photographs the only clue?

What Riley’s camera captured puts the FBI Tracker Unit on high alert, and Riley in a killer’s crosshairs. Learning the identity of the mystery man takes on an ominous urgency.

Can FBI Tracker Cody Lightfoot and Riley find the answer in time to stop a deadly attack? Or will they be the next victims?

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MY eBOOK REVIEW

HALL WAYS REVIEW: I didn’t want this story to end. 

WOW, WOW, WOW. I haven’t been this enthralled by a book in a long time. The tension, action, and edge-of-your-seat suspense made me not want THE IRIS CODE to end. This is my first Tracker novel but won’t be my last (and lucky me, there are a bunch of them to read!)

As I mentioned above in this post, I've read books in another series by Anita Dickason, so the bar was set high for this one. I expected immersive storytelling, excellent worldbuilding, and stellar editing. I got all that and still was blown away. Sure, Dickason is a gifted writer, but she also works very hard to hone her craft and deliver a finished product that rivals any traditionally published book I've read. No shortcuts are taken in her process, and it shows.

My only critiques of the book are related to my alma mater. First, the main character of the book is a Texas A&M Aggie, and she doesn't wear her Aggie ring?! That's madness. Second, our corpse is an Aggie, and everyone knows that the Aggie code is we don't cheat, steal, or lie, so... *Snicker.* 

I'm a firm believer that books come into our lives at just the right time for just the right reason. Sure, I'd had this one on the TBR for nine months, but NOW, after reading several disappointing novels in a row, was when I needed to read it. Just ask my husband -- he was the recipient of my post-read gushing about THE IRIS CODE. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Award-winning Author Anita Dickason is a twenty-two-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department. She served as a patrol officer, undercover narcotics detective, advanced accident investigator, tactical officer, and first female sniper on the Dallas SWAT team.

Anita writes about what she knows, cops and crime. Her police background provides an unending source of inspiration for her plots and characters. Many incidents and characters portrayed in her books are based on personal experience. For her, the characters are the fun part of writing as she never knows where they will take her. There is always something out of the ordinary in her stories.

In Anita’s debut novel, Sentinels of the Night, she created an elite FBI Unit, the Trackers. Since then, she has added three more Tracker crime thrillers, Going Gone!, A u 7 9, and Operation Navajo, which are not a series and can be read in any order, and Deadly Business, a crime thriller.

As a Texas author, many of Anita’s books are based in Texas, or there is a link to Texas. When she stepped outside of the Tracker novels and wrote Not Dead and the Tori Winters Mysteries series, she set them in the small Texas communities of Meridian and Granbury, respectively.

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Vanishing into the 100% Dark ~ Lone Star Lit Campaign Review & Giveaway!

VANISHING INTO 

THE 100% DARK

Bean to Bar Mysteries, #8

BY AMBER ROYER

Cozy Mystery / Culinary Mystery

Publisher: Golden Tip Press

Pages: 288

Publication Date: March 4, 2025

Scroll down to enter the giveaway!

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SYNOPSIS

Bean to chocolate maker Felicity Koerber has been invited to be part of a chocolate festival in Tokyo. It’s a big deal for a Texas gal with a chocolate shop on Galveston’s historic Strand, so a whole group of her friends come along to support her. It’s intimidating enough to be giving a class on chocolate making with the help of a translator, but she also stumbles across the scene of a murder, where a quirky group of international actors and stunt performers are making a monster movie. Felicity has already solved half a dozen murders back in Texas so at this point, her friends basically expect her to get involved – even before the young media influencer in Felicity’s group becomes the main suspect. Felicity has taken on the role of chaperone for Chloe, so she can’t imagine how she could explain what went wrong to the girl’s mother -- which gives her even more motivation to figure out the real killer.

In the meantime, things get complicated at the chocolate festival when a rival chocolate maker tries to get Felicity disqualified from the awards competition – and claims that her amateur sleuth status is bringing undesirables into the festival. And things are even more complicated as the stress of being in an unfamiliar place brings out secrets about Felicity’s friends – and her fiancé.

Honda the calico cat makes an appearance on the movie set, making Felicity homesick for her pet bunny, left at home. But the cat may know more about what happened than she is letting on. Can Felicity solve the murder in time to keep Chloe from getting arrested, while making things right with the people she cares about, and presenting a good showing at the chocolate festival?

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REVIEW

HALL WAYS REVIEW: Buckle up, readers, because you’re in for a wild ride in VANISHING INTO THE 100% DARK, the eighth book in Amber Royer’s Bean to Bar Mysteries series. Main character Felicity packs her bags, her chocolates, and a team of people to travel out of Galveston and into Tokyo, where a mess of mysteries unfolds. Prepare for twists and turns, and quite possibly a record-breaking number of red herrings.

The books in this series are formulaic but not cookie-cutter, so the series works and remains engaging. Suitcases aren’t the only things to unpack in VANISHING INTO THE 100% DARK. Readers can expect to be treated to: mouthwatering chocolate descriptions, at least one murder mystery to be solved before the wrong person is arrested, a tangle of subplots, a steal-the-show animal, a first-edition book, a multitude of new (and reintroduced) characters, and some very light romance. It’s a lot, particularly if one’s not familiar with the prior books, so I don’t recommend jumping in here. Too much has happened beforehand to lay the foundation for the relationships Felicity has established.

“How do you ask questions when you don’t

even know what you want to know?”

In VANISHING INTO THE 100% DARK, we spend a lot of time inside main character Felicity’s head, which isn’t a bad place to be given she’s quirky, quick-thinking, and savvy. A few downsides are that it creates some clunky transitions into dialogue, and we see that despite how she says otherwise, Felicity is still quite insecure in her relationship with Logan. Honestly, their relationship seems a little awkward and lackluster in this installment, and despite being told their love exists and a few scenes that showed it, I didn’t really feel the affection between Felicity and Logan. I appreciate that Royer is intentional about appropriateness and how she frames the relationship, but after the build-up to Felicity choosing #TeamLogan, I would have liked some sparks to fly.

With the international setting of VANISHING INTO THE 100% DARK, readers learn some fun tidbits about Japanese lifestyle – like their love of the local 7-11, efficient toilets with built-in sinks on top of the tanks, and that Japanese phones must make a camera shutter noise when a photo is taken (and the why! Wow!) I giggled every time a Japanese person asked Felicity if Galveston was near where JFK was shot and wondered if this was pulled from Royer’s own experience there. (I recall years ago traveling to France, when the Dallas series was all the rage, and everyone asked if I had a ranch and horses!) It’s always tricky to organically include foreign words and phrases, but Royer does it well and includes plenty of Japanese (and a few French words, thanks to chocolatier, Henri) to remind readers of the setting.  Given the author’s travels to Japan, I expected fully immersive worldbuilding, but there just isn’t space for it in keeping up with the characters and their goings-on.

From a craft perspective, Royer shines in plotting elaborate storylines, making everyone look like a suspect, and creating a core group of realistic characters for the Bean to Bar Mysteries. She is a solid, talented writer, and her books have all the right ingredients to be bestsellers. Unfortunately, for me the story’s potential is weighed down due to the need for polish and thorough editing (to eliminate the odd overuse of the past perfect tense, comma errors, and typos). While these issues affect my enjoyment of books, if you’re a fan of the genre and don’t mind a few rough edges, you’ll likely find VANISHING INTO THE 100% DARK one hundred percent charming.

I learned early on in this series that it’s best to just go with the flow. Readers are expected to suspend their disbelief, so I recommend doing that and not trying to figure out the whodunits or even the why-they-dun-its and enjoy the roller-coaster ride. By the time everything unravels, it all makes sense – and you’ll be exhausted! In VANISHING INTO THE 100% DARK, the action, culinary delights, and Godzilla-like monsters will keep readers entertained to the delicious end.

To learn more about the book, look for #LoneStarLitVanishingIntoThe100Dark on your preferred social media platform.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amber Royer writes the Chocoverse space opera series and the Bean to Bar Mysteries. She is also the author of Story Like a Journalist: a Workbook for Novelists and has co-authored a chocolate-related cookbook with her husband. She also teaches creative writing and is an author coach.

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TWO WINNERS

receive autographed copies of Vanishing into the 100% Dark

(US only; ends midnight, CDT, 3/20/25)