My review is on the book and the story even though it was hard going with the mistakes in it I wanted to carry on.
Love the new characters in this series and the story was interesting not the normal style for JD but was enjoyed and I will read more to see where we go with it. I want to know about Shaw family and his relationships and see if any of the characters pop up again.
Would recommend this book once it's been edited and mistakes taken out the k you NetGalley author and publisher for my arc copy x

This is certainly a book with a contemporary context. The plot is based on video games and a criminal focussed on acting out the games in real life. At times it can be very technical and heavily descriptive. The lead investigator gets part of his income from seeking rewards for finding missing persons. He is a well constructed character adding depth to the story. Periodically we get glimpses of his past life,particularly the influence of his father in making him the person he is. It is unlikely in real life that the police would have put up with his involvement but this is far from being reality. The story also goes back and forward from time to time. The book is well written but it's technical context will not suit all readers.

We are introduced to Colter Shaw, a man with a strange survivalist upbringing having been raised in a huge forested and mountainous compound (think: National park type size!) with his brother and sister by his ex-academic parents who quit their professional world and ‘retired’ to live in the wilderness.
Shaw earns his living by tracing lost/missing people, then claiming the reward; but he is no ‘bounty hunter’. He doesn’t go for the highest paying job – the emotional cost is more important to him. He sometimes doesn’t even take the reward! He’s a driven man: determination, survival and strong sense of moral justice instilled by his father.

This tale is set in Silicon Valley – you learn a lot about gaming, the gaming community – the sheer numbers involved worldwide and the sums of money invested and generated therein. Also how people live in order to have highly regarded jobs in that area. And the business competitiveness in that field, as high as in politics.
People start being kidnapped – they are in strange locations with clues, mirroring a game. But this is no straightforward copy. Twists, turns, false starts, lies, clues and plants are everywhere.

Shaw’s personal life is also intriguing, both in his current relationships and his past. There is a family mystery that underlies everything he has been brought up to believe in – Where is his reclusive older brother who he has not seen for 15 years?

Some of the American speech had me a bit flummoxed at first (I’m UK, lol), but I stuck at it and I’m glad I did. Not my usual type of read – but I’m convinced, and await the next instalment for more answers and thrills.

This story completes the introduction of a new series character for Deaver called Colter Shaw. He first appeared in the short-story 'Captivated' and this new novel expands on the character, pitching him against a deadly, high-tech’ foe.

Shaw is a bit like a bounty-hunter except that he doesn’t like to call himself that, and he has his own set of noble ethics. To make a living he helps find missing persons for people offering a reward for the task, calling his current client the “Offeror”. By the time of this story Shaw has been plying his trade for ten years and is an old hand at it.

With his small team of back-office associates - neighbours in his Florida home town and a Private Investigator - Shaw travels where he needs to in search of clues. The team keep his back research-wise and by the miracle of modern technology ensure he’s updated when necessary.

As the book opens we find Shaw struggling to rescue a pregnant lady from a sinking boat in freezing temperatures. The task seems too much, threatening to overwhelm him and as the situation gradually worsens we flash back a few days to the events leading up to the deadly drama.

This is a well-written and entertaining mix of adventure and detective work, with Shaw and his new acquaintances struggling to stop a serial-kidnapper and murderer from striking again, all set against a backdrop of the highest of technology smack in the middle of the world’s most tech-savvy place - Silicon Valley.

A major clue to finding out who is behind a series of kidnaps is a popular video game. Deaver has obviously done a lot of research in and around the computer games industry. His characters are lively and nicely formed, some more deeply than others. All are troubled in one way or another. There’s a back-story too about Shaw’s upbringing and his family’s paranoid, survivalist training. There are mysteries buried deep there and in a parallel plot line he is struggling to make sense of his eccentric father’s death, hoping against hope his suspicions aren’t true.

To round out the character there’s some love interest here too but it doesn’t amount to much, though it does add more character development and a new set of possibilities for future collaboration.

As the investigation into who the kidnapper is moves towards its conclusion, Shaw’s past comes back to bite him in an unexpected but well thought-out twist, tying-up an earlier part of the plot which by that time we’ve almost forgotten about. A classic “Ah-ha!” moment of realisation.

It’s a double-ending type of story that keeps coming back until the final page and naturally points towards the prospect of another instalment with this enjoyable and dynamic, if slightly dour character.

Colter Shaw is in the same loner-hero mould we’ve come to know well in recent American thrillers, but in fairness to Deaver his creation is no carbon-copy and is his own, fully explored character with a lot of mileage yet to be extracted from his unusual upbringing.

Readers new to Deaver but familiar with American thrillers will certainly enjoy his new creation. Those who have read the author before will appreciate his new direction and character. Those who have done neither will find this a great introduction to a renowned-for-quality, best-selling author,

This is a Recommended read. One I sped through, enjoying the descriptive prose which made for very easy reading.

This was an ok read. It grabbed me slowly. I was expecting wam bam and to be utterly gripped within the first few pages as other JD books have grabbed me by just reading the back cover but not so. It was a welcome addition to my bookshelf however and I look forward to seeing how this series develops in future books.

Thank you to Netgalley and the author and publishers for the opportunity to read this book in advance of publication in return for an honest review.

I haven’t read a Jeffrey Denver book for quite a while - I read all his early ones - and he hasn’t lost his touch. I’m reasonably computer literate, but I’m not a gamer, however I could keep up with most of the gaming parts and if I got a bit lost, I still got the gist of it.. The book lost a star for me because I had to skip over some of the gaming parts. I really liked his leading character, Colter Shaw, who searches for missing people when rewards are offered. This sounds a bit mercenary but it really isn’t, he’s a great character and puts everything into finding people whom the police haven’t managed to. Colter was brought up by survivalists and his father taught him everything he needed to know about survival and tracking in the wilderness, these skills are what makes him so successful at what he does.
His first case in this book is a young woman called Sophie, whose father is beside himself over her disappearance, and the police aren’t taking it very seriously, Sophie is alive, but locked in a room she can’t get out of. Two more people go missing within days of each other and Sophie but there are no connections between the three of them.
Sophie wakes to find herself in a locked room with several things that she can use to escape - if she can work out what to use these things for..
The suspense gets hold of you and doesn’t let go - you really want to reach the end of the book to find out who or what is behind these disappearances, but you don’t want to reach the end as you don’t want to let go of Colter and the allies he finds in the police force who are also characters you’ll like.
I’m now going to go back and read the Jeffrey Deaver books that I’ve missed.

Sadly the ARC of this book is so badly formatted it is a chore to read it. I think if the book had grabbed me in I could have ploughed through, decoding words that were joined together. But at a quarter of the way through, I’m still yet to get into the story, or characters so it’s a no from me. Which is a shame, because I’ve enjoyed many Jeffrey Deaver books in the past.

I found this book almost unreadable because of the formatting and grammatical and spelling errors. Is it a first draft? Im surprised an author of this calibre would release this version.

A pager turner with good characters, well-written characters, and most importantly an interesting, solid plot. I'm not a very avid gamer but I do play certain games and I enjoyed the descriptions and the details. I liked Colter Shaw, who is a glorified bounty hunter, but unlike bounty hunters doesn't hunt criminals but tries to collect rewards by finding missing people. I enjoyed this book and I look forward to the next book in the series, A big thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for giving me this book in exchange of my hones review.

I read the first few of Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books back in the 1990s/early 2000s and really liked them. I was also a big fan of his WW2 thriller ‘Garden of Beasts’. I was excited, then, to read ‘The Never Game’, which is being touted as the first in a new series from him. Unfortunately, my excitement was misplaced. 20 years ago, ‘The Bone Collector’ felt fresh and compelling; by comparison, ‘The Never Game’ is tired and distinctly uninvolving.
The plot is okay, but no more than that. Someone is kidnapping upstanding citizens and imprisoning them in bizarre locales where they have a slim chance of escaping. Deaver’s new hero, Colter Shaw, is an investigator who finds missing persons for a reward. He’s also a slightly weird survivalist type with a lot of back story and a bad case of much better at most things than anyone else. In other words, he’s like the heroes of a thousand other low rent thrillers. That’s disappointing, because Lincoln Rhyme was such a great creation, by comparison Shaw is massively uninteresting.
The kidnappings are linked in some way to a popular video game, and the book ends up adopting a structure similar to levels in a game. This was reasonably successful, but the overload of information about gaming that accompanies it was not. It feels like Deaver decided that the video game industry would make a good backdrop for a mystery, set his researcher off to find out about it, and then felt compelled to use every single fact they came back with, whether it was relevant to the plot or not. We end up with tonnes of detail which slows the story down.
I feel like I often end up saying this in my reviews, but I think a good editor could have tightened it up enough that I’d have enjoyed it more. That wouldn’t have solved the problems with Shaw, but it might at least have meant that I got to the end of the book actually caring whodunnit.

Start of a new series for J Deaver with the reward seeker Coulter Shaw. Interesting character with good back story that has only scratched the surface. Book has lots of red herrings which keep you guessing until the end. Good focus on real world stories with some subtle political references. We you like Jack Reacher you will enjoy this book. I look forward to next instalment.

Sadly I never made it past the 1st chapter as the formatting was askew, thus I'm unable to post a review.

Jeffrey Deaver thriller, engaging and a bit different.

Colter Shaw (not a policeman, nor a bounty hunter but a collector of rewards) gets involved in a kidnapping and rescue attempts. The plot includes a lot of interesting well-fleshed out characters, some trustworthy, others less so. From survivalism to video gaming, it covers a variety of topics and can get quite complicated. It’s engaging writing and an enjoyable story. Any fan of the author should find the book worth a look - as I did. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a well written (as you’d expect from this author) book with a difference. I struggled with it, mainly due to my not having any interest in the world of gaming. However, I’m sure it will be enjoyed by those who do, as well as by his legion of fans and I wish it every success.

Many thanks for the opportunity to preview.

I am a fan of Deaver's books, particularly Lincoln Rhyme and Kathryn Dance, and I could certainly feel his style in The Never Game. Because I know his work, I knew the obvious culprit wouldn't end up being the culprit, nor the next obvious culprit, and so on and expected a few twists on that and got them. Overall, I liked this book. I did find it a tad hard to get into, and the formatting was terrible so I had to reread many bits when words were jammed together, but the latter is not going to be an issue when the book is out (one hopes). The former, though... It wasn't the dire situation at the get-go, which of course became the frame—present leading to how we got here and then how it's resolved—it was what followed that dire situation, and again, just at the beginning of the story. It took a while, but once I got into it, I was into it. And although I've played very few video games and nothing in the last 15 years, I could follow all the computer and gaming lingo and I thought Deaver did a good job of explaining it by repeating it and describing what's what. The gaming details might not be to everyone's taste, but they were fine for me. I think Colter Shaw will be a good character as the author writes more in the series and gets closer to him. Looking forward to the next one.

I didn’t get off to a great start with this book, as it wasn’t properly formatted, making it very hard to read. However, I persevered, but unfortunately my efforts were not rewarded. Colter Shaw is a two-dimensional, unrealistic character, who appears to have an unfortunate fixation with expensive writing tools. The story is rather tedious, with too-long passages, which will only be of interested to gamers. I found the whole book far-fetched, and certainly won’t be rushing to read another Colter Shaw story. Thank you to Galley and Harper Collins for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for my honest review

This is the first book in the Colter Shaw series by author Jeffery Deaver. I am a an avid reader of this authors novels and love the Lincoln Rhyme series so was keen to read this new one. I enjoyed the new character investigator Colter Shaw, who I am sure will develop in time to another excellent addition to Jeffery Deaver's repertoire. But tbh I struggled getting into the plot in this book, I am not into video games etc and couldn't really connect with the story-line. Colter Shaw however shows great promise and there are lots of sub plots and secrets to let loose there. Not for me this time but will continue to read the series in the future as enjoy not only the authors writing but also Colter Shaw.
I would like to thank Net Galley and Harper Collins for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

This was my first book by Jeffery Deaver and I quite enjoyed it it was a fast paced thriller and the start of a new series featuring Colter Shaw who is a interesting character with a lot of issues from his past to deal with, a guy who looks for missing people for the the reward money which makes for a pleasant change from the norm. I guess for me the issue I have is that I prefer British thrillers mainly and found at times this book a little hard to connect with made all the harder with the awful formatting of the arc but I persevered and on the whole thought it was a good read and I am sure others will enjoy it more.
My thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins UK for giving me the chance to read the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I loved Jeffrey Deaver’s previous books & was thrilled to be given the opportunity to review this introduction to a new series.

Sadly for me this didn’t live up to expectations. There were many editing errors that stopped the flow of the story as I had to pause to surmise what the correct sentence should be.

The new character is interesting and intriguing so I’d definitely read the next book in the series even though this one wasn’t to my taste.

I have a new series to enjoy! The premise of this book sounded so exciting, i wasn't sure the story could live up to it but it definitely did. Colter Shaw is a great character i found fascinating and seeing how his childhood shaped the man he is today and what he chooses to do. The female characters were very well written and i enjoyed the interactions between Colter and Maddie as well as his working with Detective Standish. I'm not a gamer and there is a heavy gamer element to the book but i didn't struggle to follow it as Deaver's explanation were very good. I look forward to the next in the series.