The Operator is the latest book by award winning author Kim Harrison. It is the second book in the Peri Reed Chronicles, the first being The Drafter.
I am assuming that The Operator begins very close in time to where The Drafter ends. I haven’t read the first, so I can’t speak for certain. However, The Operator opens with Peri in the coffee shop that she owns, trying to piece the last year back together. She is a Drafter, which means she can rewind time for a bit and rewrite it. It means that she loses a period of time in her life though. Which causes some problems because new memories can be placed there, ones that Peri can’t dispute because she has no organic memories of that place in time.
Peri is given a copy of the diary she kept during her training at OPTI, and as she begins to piece back together those pieces of her past, that past comes calling again. Her constant companion, Jack, was her Anchor. The person Peri trusted to fill in her memory blanks from Drafting. Jack betrayed her, and is now a hallucination that Peri uses as her intuition. But Jack is back, the real Jack. And he’s got some tricks up his sleeve that Peri isn’t prepared for.
When her former “boss” at OPTI tries to lure Peri back, she tries to run. Tries to keep her life as her own. But the promises that she’s being made seem almost too good to be true. Can he really have a drug that can allow Peri to draft by herself, eliminating her need for an anchor, and thus eliminating the potential for all of her memories to be erased and rewritten?
The Operator takes us on a thrill ride, as Peri both works with and tries to evade the CIA, OPTI, and the local police, all while trying to piece together her real past. She meets old “friends” and new ones, and has to determine who is less likely to get her suckered into working for them, or killed. And on some occasions, being killed is only temporary, so it’s the question of permanently killed, instead of “mostly dead”.
The Operator was fun, but I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d read The Drafter first. Kim Harrison writes books in a series, and while they can be read alone, it’s always better to read them in order. There is so much background information, character development, and general information you miss if you don’t start with the first book in each series. It was a bit of a slog though, I kept picking it up and putting it back down, because while it was good and enjoyable, it just didn’t seem to grab me as tightly as some other books do. I liked it, but it wasn’t fantastic, and won’t go on my “read again” list. However, I’d still recommend it, if you like semi dystopian books, kick-ass heroines, people dealing with some serious (metaphorical, in this case) demons, etc. It’s worth a read, with the caveat of reading The Drafter first.
- Series: The Peri Reed Chronicles
Mass Market Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Pocket Books (November 22, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1501149911
ISBN-13: 978-1501149917
Robin is a semi-coherent, almost sentient being. She has some strange ideas, and some even stranger friends. Disabled, queer, agnostic, accident-prone & other adjectives.
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