Reviewed by Taylin
TITLE: Shards of Hope
SERIES: FISA Agents #1
AUTHOR: B L Jones
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 309 Pages
RELEASE DATE: Jan 19, 2023
BLURB:
Hope can be a prism of scars from which light shines.
Twenty years ago, an infamous scientist created Liquid Onyx, a world-changing chemical which led to the rise of superheroes and supervillains.
Jack Roth is not a superhero. He’s an assassin, a killer, a lethal weapon forged and controlled by the evil organisation Obsidian Inc.
Leo Snow isn’t a superhero either. He’s a British secret agent who spends his life protecting the world and saving everyone he can.
When these two men’s lives collide on the streets of Danger City just as Obsidian Inc is gearing up for another cataclysmic scientific discovery, they’ll both need to reckon with their dark past, messy present and potentially hopeful future.
REVIEW:
As a liquid Onyx survivor, Jack has been caged all his life, only let out for specific purposes. His world within Obsidian Inc is ruled by a rod of iron. Any sign of weakness and the cause is removed, cruelly, efficiently and without remorse. Jack was conditioned in a world of cold, hard, dark brutality, there’s only one way to survive – comply. Leo’s heritage was in OI, but his allegiance is with the British Forces of Investigation and Security – FISA, who protects the world’s civilians against organizations like OI. In many ways, Leo’s life is very different to Jack’s, in that, he chooses to be an Agent. However, he remains at the mercy of a different manipulation style, no less deadly than Jack’s. When the agent and the assassin encounter each other, something special happens.
Shards of Hope is a story that I simultaneously loved and wanted to scream at frustratedly.
The tale is told in the first person from the viewpoints of Jack and Leo, with extensive worldbuilding. And this is where personal preference could determine the adoration or frustration of this story. The narrative is packed with experiences of the ‘I remember when’, variety. Individually, they are more than entertaining. However, it is their timing that I found irritating. For example, Leo would go into a room and, in a high-tension situation, ask a question, then the story goes off on a tangent, and three pages later, the answer to the original question is delivered. The occasional digression is more than welcome, but this type of scenario happened every time, and after a while, it stopped entertaining and became an annoyance. Conversely, these extra additions filled out the world that Leo and Jack lived in, and without them, the novel would have been significantly shorter. They also added an edge of levity to a dark, bloodthirsty tale.
I can draw parallels between Jack’s trauma, Wolverines’, and the Winter Soldier. He is tortured and conditioned to the point of being a human machine, programmed, and then set loose. This content aspect of the opening chapters was challenging to read. Add to it Leo’s dry, sarcastic humor alongside a sad soul, and the result is a random lunatic of a ride that borders on genius.
There is no doubt in my mind that a heck of a lot of thought went into this story, and it is recommended reading for that alone. Fewer detours would have been appreciated, though I am unsure if this was the authors’ way of providing all the backstory, and in the future, there will be more mission and less ‘this one time’ (I so want to add, at Bandcamp, here).
I’ve given it four hearts in the hope that you’ll read it and make of it what you will, because I have no idea.
RATING: 
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