The Three

I had high hopes for this novel

Unfortunately, it did not quite live up to my expectations.

The book is done in the format of an assemblage of first-person accounts of the happenings, from people in countries all over the world. The premise was interesting, and I thought the plotting was pretty well done.

However, the people of different nationalities didn't seem to have as distinctive "voices" as would be necessary to really pull off this conceit. For the most part, I thought the U.S. accounts were fairly true to the speakers' country and regions. And I can't really speak for the South African or the Japanese characters' voices, except that they did not seem that different from the U.S. voices. But the British sections did not seem at all authentic to me -- in fact, I had to keep reminding myself during those sections that I was reading accounts from Brits. The author tried -- there was some UK slang thrown in here and there -- but I've read a lot of British books and spent a lot of time around Brits, and the "voices" just weren't spot-on. But if you aren't overly familiar with the way Brits write and speak, you probably wouldn't notice this.

The other really off-putting thing for me was the amount of over-the-top religious evangelizing in some of the accounts. I've had more than enough of being subjected to this in real life, and am not really in the mood to read any more of it -- even though it fits perfectly into the plotting and the plausibility of the story -- and I ended up just skipping over most of those parts.

If you're looking for straight-up horror, you won't find it here. This is really more of a mystery/suspense novel with paranormal themes (which I actually much prefer to straight-up horror, so that was good).

I don't feel that the time I spent reading this book was wasted, but I won't be submitting nominations for awards for it, either. If you're into paranormal mystery/suspense, or if you enjoyed John Scalzi's  Unlocked, you might very well enjoy this book.