They always say true love means you’d be willing to die for someone, but that’s not quite it; true love is being willing to kill for someone.

The Slaying Game is another exciting, fast-paced installment in Faith Gardner’s Jolvix Episodes. Like the others, it is set in the future, though not so far ahead that it’s implausible. In fact, that’s the creepy part: The invasive, too-smart technology—and the ways it can be misused in the wrong hands—is scary easy to imagine:

That’s how technology works. You put something out there, you know soon it’ll be corrupted. That’s how humans work. They’re corruptive little creatures.

The characters are all a little bit broken, but they’re so real and relatable that you can’t help but like them in spite of—or maybe because of—those flaws. As the reader, you can’t help but root for them, faults and all, as they’re forced to deal with a killer on their own, concocting a dangerous plan that could easily backfire. And it very well might: As Faith has proven, she’s not above torturing or even killing off main characters… so you really don’t know who will survive to the end!

Faith has become an auto-read author for me. She could give me a book with no cover, no title, and no blurb, and I would read it, no questions asked!