In 2082, androids are an essential part of daily life. Some are helpful, some would make better toasters, and some are so human-like they’re creepy. Back in Atlanta, Detective Cooper’s latest client has him searching for her boyfriend who she thinks was replaced by a simulation, an illegal clone android. The guy also happens to be a popular new congressman.

To make matters more complicated, Cooper keeps crossing paths with his ex, FBI Agent Geri Harper, as they seem to be looking for the same guy. Cooper knows he’s getting close when Geri is kidnapped, but when she resurfaces in Washington and goes on a killing spree, he knows it isn’t her. Now under suspicion himself, Cooper must find the real Geri to prove her innocence, not to mention hunt down the powerful villain behind it all. Never a dull moment.

After the pleasant surprise that was the first novel in this series, Pop Travel, I was really looking forward to this book. However, as the story seemed quite finished with the first book, I was wondering what was going to happen in this novel.

Fast forward two years, and meet all the characters from the first book again. This felt a little bit odd at times, because except for some awkwardness between Cooper and Geri, there didn't seem to be much difference in the interactions between the different characters even though they apparently hadn't really stayed in contact for that time.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the book. It's not uncommon but it manages to annoy me every single time when the main characters seem to be the only people ever to uncover some kind of a big plot/conspiracy, especially so if this happens due to extreme coincidence or sheer luck. I don't read novels like this for their believability of course, but am I to believe that Cooper, who hasn't really achieved a lot in two years time, would just happen to stumble again in 'the case of the century'? And what a luck that Geri was just working this case as well, of all cases.

But when I just put these issues aside I quite enjoyed myself. It was a quick and easy read. Near the end I kind of lost some interest, but it was no chore to finish the book. I would read the next book in the series as well.

Simulation is the second book in the Pop Travel series, after Pop Travel.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review during this blog tour!

About The Author:

Tara Tyler started out as a math teacher. After having a hand in everything from waitressing to rocket engineering and living up and down the Eastern US, she now writes and teaches in Ohio with her three active boys and Coach Husband.

Currently, she has two series, The Cooper Chronicles (techno-thriller detective capers) and Beast World (MG fantasy) She’s an adventure writer who believes every good story should have a moral, plus a few laughs.

Find Tara Tyler Online:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

If we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts—the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by beings confused with the real through aging)—as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (1)

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. (13)