Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future by John Scalzi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was nothing more than an old-fashioned murder mystery dressed up as SciFi, and not a very good one at that. It was entirely dialogue driven, and the dialogue wasn’t very good either, it sounded phony and unnatural, like it does when the writer constantly struggles to come up with clever phrases and comebacks for his characters.

As for the mystery itself, everything was dangling in the air until the very last, few pages, at which time it was all neatly unraveled. Everything was told, nothing left for the reader to figure out, predict or anticipate.

As for the basic premise of the novel – people who are “locked in” functioning in the world through mechanical “threeps” – there were just too many holes and glitches for me to find it believable, or even plausible.