Dark Application - Brian Krogstad & Lindsey Waterman

Description
Luke Jeffers is a student at Brafferton Community College in Fort Christanna, Virginia. Like any other college guy, he dreams about Amy, his grade-school crush, and finds time to party on the weekends while struggling to make his meager budget pay his bills. But unlike anyone else, Luke has discovered the secret Department of Defense Application for Remote Kinetics that unlocks a whirlwind of shocking events, and changes Luke's life direction forever.

While working as an intern at a Computer Information Systems research facility, Luke secretly downloads games from the main server onto his smart phone. Unbeknownst to him, Dark Application is also installed on his phone. And once Dark Application is installed on a phone, it can never be removed. Suddenly Luke's life takes on utterly unpredicted changes; he passes his first Chemistry exam, he mysteriously acquires a large sum of money, and he finally gets the girl of his dreams go out with him on Valentine's Day. Slowly the Dark Application sucks him in, and he becomes addicted and unable to put it down.

Lurking just around the corner in this thriller are horrific secrets and mystery that land Luke in a world of hurt, and he becomes entangled in a web of murder, lies, and criminal activities that shock the town and lead to his ultimate destruction. Dark Application: One, is the technothriller of the iPhone era and a fast-paced, quick read, that will lead into the next book of The Dark Application Series.

My Opinion
Standing at 26,391 words (100 pages) this book was an incredibly quick read that took only a few hours to read. Even though it was a shorter book than I would have normally like there was a lot of content packed into it. 

Dark Applications had a unique, modern and interesting concept as it followed Luke Jeffers when his life started to slowly be controlled by an app he downloaded. There was a lot of action included in the short amount of pages and it did keep you hooked when reading. It made you want to read on and find out what the phone was going to make him do next. The start also gripped me. It intrigued me into what had happened and linked with the ending nicely. I really didn't see the way it ended coming.

However sometimes the book lacked detail and jumped from once scene to the next quite rapidly. Although this didn't confuse me, I would have liked to have had more of a back story and for it to 'show me' with description rather than 'telling me' as I couldn't really connect with the characters as the book stands now. Also I found myself questioning the believe-ability of the plot and whether or not someone would really just follow a message on the phone without question. For me it just didn't seem realistic but maybe that was because of the little description or maybe it needed smaller tasks before building up to following directions.

As well as this the writing did become a little repetitive. I don't mean the story line but rather the sentence structure. Quite often there were occurrence where sentences that followed on from each other started with the same word "She...She...She..." I think the book could use another edit to pick up on this to help the writing flow smoother and not become repetitive.

Overall this was an interesting read that has both good and bad points. It was original, action packed and surprising which was great considering it is such a short book. For me though it wasn't as believable as I would have liked and the lack of detail made it hard for me to engage with the characters. I think this book could be really interesting if it goes through another edit so the repetitiveness is removed and it shows the reader instead of telling them.