I read the first book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ political thriller series for teens, The Fixer, when I picked it up at TLA last year (2015) and thought it was pretty great. The “Scandal for teens” tagline is very apt, though I would say it’s a bit less soapy (at least in comparison with the first season of Scandal, which is all I’ve watched). And then the sequel, The Long Game, was available at TLA this year and I dove in immediately.
Right away, I knew this one was even better than the last. But I had no idea how it would blow my mind about two-thirds of the way through. It’s a twisty, fast-paced read with revelations around every corner right from the beginning…and then in the last third, Barnes seriously steps up the ante even more and the book was impossible for me to put down until I finished. I’m not sure I even breathed for those last 150 pages or so.
The Fixer introduced us to teenage Tess, whom we discovered was the daughter (not the much younger sister) of Ivy Kendrick, a famous Washington, DC fixer. She goes to school at Hardwicke, where most of the children of Washington’s elite also attend. There, she helped unravel a conspiracy to murder a Supreme Court Justice while also helping her fellow students with their own fixes.
The Long Game starts off with Tess coming to terms with the realization that Ivy is her mother, and her parents (who have been dead for some time) are actually her grandparents. And of course, there’s another job for her: Emilia, the sister of Tess’ friend Asher, wants Tess to help her win the student council election. Tess doesn’t like Emilia that much, but she’s running against John Thomas Wilcox, who is kind of like a flying Texas cockroach, but worse. So she agrees to make it happen.
Like in the first book, Tess’ fixing “job” at school overlaps with Ivy’s own machinations. A bomb goes off at a local hospital and the terrorist they arrest has ties to the President’s eldest son. At the school, John Thomas steps up his game and starts threatening Emilia and Tess and their friends with whispers of blackmail. When researching how John Thomas might have come into possession of such information, the trail leads back to John Thomas’ father, a senator, who also may have some sort of connection to the arrested terrorist. Everything appears to be connected in some way, and Tess tries to figure out how and why as the stakes continue to rise. And Barnes pulls no punches in what she puts her characters through.
You know how in a lot of thrillers, the plotting is mostly good, but occasionally the only way to communicate necessary information to the reader is via infodump, or to have the main character do something stupid and out of character, or to have the villain monologue near the end? Barnes doesn’t need to do that. She is a master plotter and could school every other thriller writer whose work I’ve ever read. The details build on every single page, and they all cohere and make sense. Tess is smart and what she discovers fits with what she has learned before. There are multiple red herrings and possibilities, but then the puzzle pieces all come together at the end. Something you thought might be a throwaway line actually has meaning later on. A small, loose plot thread other authors might have left dangling turns out to be important. There are so many things going on, so much to figure out, that even if you guess some of it on your own, there’s still so much to be revealed. When I think of Barnes writing this novel, I envision her with a huge whiteboard and lots of lines connecting different ideas and characters and events together.
Not only is the book brilliantly plotted, it’s peopled with interesting, complex characters, Tess primary among them, but also Emilia and Henry, Tess’ potential love interest. The relationship between Tess and Ivy also deepens and possibly begins to heal, though it remains imperfect. There’s one big, unanswered question by the end, an opening for the third book, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it.
The Long Game hit shelves yesterday, and you should all do yourselves a favor and pick it up.