The Virals are put to the ultimate test when they find a geocache containing an ornate puzzle box. Shelton decodes the cipher inside, only to find more tantalizing clues left by "The Gamemaster." A second, greater geocache is within reach--if the Virals are up to the challenge.
But the hunt takes a dark turn when Tory locates the other box--a fake bomb, along with a sinister proposal from The Gamemaster. Now, the real game has begun: another bomb is out there--a real one--and the clock is ticking.
Review:
For those who don’t know the series, Virals is about how 4 teens (Tory (the first-person protagonist), Hi, Shelton and Ben) get infected with a modified strain of parvovirus, which, instead of killing them, gives them canine-like abilities which they can essentially turn on and off at will. Code is the third book in the series. In a word, this book was AMAZING (think the word amazing only sung in falsetto). It had a crazy intensity to its suspense which the other books did not, and it got a bit away from the Nancy Drew-like feel of the previous two. About halfway through the book, the plot sinks its claws into you and will not let you put the darn book down until you finish it even though it’s past 2 AM already (I know this from experience). Not to say it lacks suspense before that point – there’s plenty throughout the book – it just takes that long for the tension to build to the point where the book is “unputdownable”. Some reviewers thought the antagonist was too “out there” or too much like a “comic book villain”. I did not find this to be the case at all – the antagonist very much resembles the villain from Déjà Vu as a character and I didn’t find that villain, or the one in Code, to be “cartoonish” in the least.
Unfortunately though, the book wasn’t perfect. My biggest problem was that comic relief, which was so perfectly used in the first two books, was lacking in this one. This was a little understandable due to the greater intensity of this books premise, but I still missed it. In addition, surprisingly little of the book is given over to the subplots that added a certain levity to the other books, and even when they do appear, they’ve grown surprisingly darker than they were. To give a couple examples, the Ben/Jason pseudo-love triangle/rivalry actually gets violent (they both have huge crushes on Tory but she is completely clueless and has essentially friend-zoned both of them), and a member of the Tripod (a group of female bullies at Tory’s school) now suspects Tory of being a witch. One thing that has NOT changed from the first two though is the sheer ditziness and naivete of Tory’s dad’s Southern belle of a girlfriend – Whitney. Her presence, while it is a painful annoyance to Tory, provides a good part of the comic relief that there is in Code.
Another thing that made the previous two books very distinctive is their use of twists. Code has its own twist as well, and it is one that one will never see coming, but it doesn’t make much of a difference in the way the book plays out, so that department is also a little lacking.
My final (small) issues with Code were the sheer simplicity of some of the puzzles the Gamemaster gave the Virals to solve (I figured a few out before the characters did) and a bit of a typo midway through where Tory turns off her canine abilities yet keeps using them somehow.
All in all though, I loved this book. It was intense, fast-paced and awesome. This series is highly recommended to all Maximum Ride fans (especially since these books don’t have half the issues with them that the Max Ride books did). I eagerly anticipated this book for half a year and did it ever deliver. It ends with just enough of a cliff-hanger that I simply CANNOT wait for the next book.
4.5/5 stars
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