Not Her - Noah Fitz

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from Booksprout

Official Blurb:

The app tells kids to kill themselves… and they do it.
In a small town near Berlin, schoolkids are dying to fulfill a string of dangerous internet challenges. A pretty girl plunges off a bridge while posing for a picture. A young man electrocutes himself in front of an online audience.
Chief Inspector Marc Wulf, along with his new partner, Tine Stolz, discovers a dark truth behind the challenges: they are not random, and neither are the victims. Wulf and Stolz race to uncover the identity of the app developer before the next challenge drops… along with another body.
In this startling thriller, author Noah Fitz strikes at an internet generation driven by the need for constant stimulation, a lust for status, and the fear of not belonging. Just how far will kids go to fit in?

My Thoughts:

Hmmm, well, I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this book at all. I was really excited by the premise and decided to give an unknown (to me) author a try on Booksprout.
I didn’t know going into it that it was a German translation, so I’m not sure if some things got lost in translation or whether it was just poorly written. The English was perfect but whether it had really picked up all the German nuances and translated them into the same kind of narrative is another matter.
The way the characters spoke to one another, to begin with, was very harsh and abrupt. I personally didn’t see much wrong with Marc Wulf (other than when he threatened some random people with the ear thing). I thought he was taking his job seriously and putting everything he had into the investigation. However, his colleagues, friends and family thought this was a character fault.
I couldn’t understand everything that was going on; I’m not sure if it was cultural differences or as mentioned the oval language that had been chosen as the translation. We would jump from scene to scene, and I’d be wondering what on earth was going on. There were very peculiar segues from one chapter to the next.
I almost gave up on this so many times but decided with it only being a short book at 230-pages long I would continue to slog away at it. I was excited to see who was behind the app and the atrocities and see why they were doing this.
However, the ending was a massive let down, after painstakingly eliminating most of the book’s characters as the perpetrator we finally land on the one behind it all. To say it was a let down is an understatement, it certainly wasn’t worth persevering with the book for anyway!
Overall, a very strange book that left me confused and disappointed. Only a two-star read from me (I’m giving the language side of things the benefit of the doubt, otherwise it would only have been one!). I’m sorry that this is the first review going out into the world for this book; I made a commitment via Booksprout for an honest review.

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