Wow! Another amazing book by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Tess Kendrick is once again in the center of controversy as she becomes the target of a politically connected bully at her school who tries to use student council elections as a way to hurt the people that Tess cares about. When the bully is killed on school grounds on the same day that someone attempts to assassinate the president and a terrorist bomb goes off at a local hospital, Tess quickly realizes that all these events are connected. There are some very surprising twists in this story along with lots of action and intrigue as well as a little bit of romance. My only minor complaint about this book was that it took some time to get reacquainted with the characters and relationships, but by the middle of the book, most of that had been cleared up. I read recently that this is to be the last book in the Fixer Series. There has to be a way to change that because the character of Tess Kendrick Keyes should never be allowed to lie dormant. There are several questions left unanswered at the end of The Long Game that beg for another story to be told.

This duology comes to an end with ‘The Long Game’, which is a continuation of the story of Tess and Ivy, both resident Fixers of Washington, D.C. While Tess is reluctant to embrace her new role as a Fixer, Ivy has been a Fixer long enough to have made some powerful enemies, including William Keyes, the man who trained her.

With Tess’s relationship with Ivy in an awkward mess, the teenaged girl is reluctant to trust her guardian with any of the problems she’s facing at Hardwicke, her school. But when Ivy takes on a case that puts both of them, and everybody else in Washington, in danger, it comes down to Tess to negotiate with those who threaten to taken everything away from her.

This book is a thriller that delivers on that promise. The tension throughout the novel is fantastic, and you don’t know who you can trust. This is a great ending to the two part series that Barnes has expertly crafted. The style of writing appealed to me in a way that few books do, and I had to know more about the characters and the world that Tess and her friends inhabit.

There are some really heavy themes in this book, so I think older teens would get more out of this. But if you loved the first book and think you can handle death, betrayal, and a threat to the very country, this book is for you. A great political thriller that will keep you enthralled from start to finish, if you like suspense, this is a selection that I couldn’t recommend enough (As long as you read the first book before it!).

The title pretty much sums it up

I thought this book was good, but it felt really similar to the first one.