Publisher: Atria
Date of publication: December 2018
After two years of living on cheap beer and little else in a bitterly cold tiny cabin outside an abandoned, crumbling mansion, young programmers Shawn Eagle and Billy Stafford have created something that could make them rich: a revolutionary computer they name Eagle Logic.
But the hard work and escalating tension have not been kind to their once solid friendship—Shawn’s girlfriend Emily has left him for Billy, and a third partner has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. While Billy walks away with Emily, Shawn takes Eagle Logic, which he uses to build a multi-billion-dollar company that eventually outshines Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined.
Years later, Billy is a failure, beset by poverty and addiction, and Shawn is the most famous man in the world. Unable to let the past be forgotten, Shawn decides to resurrect his and Billy’s biggest failure: a next-generation computer program named Nellie that can control a house’s every function. He decides to set it up in the abandoned mansion they worked near all those years ago. But something about Nellie isn’t right—and the reconstruction of the mansion is plagued by accidental deaths. Shawn is forced to bring Billy back, despite their longstanding mutual hatred, to discover and destroy the evil that lurks in the source code.
I was really looking forward to reading The Mansion. I was in the mood for a good haunted house story. Throw in some AI tech and it should have been a good time. I did like the premise. A spooky mansion has been fitted with an AI like computer system that should prove to make living there a dream. "Nellie"'s job is to anticipate what the residents and guests need and make sure it happens. When Billy is hired to try to get out the bugs in the system, things start to go very wrong.
While I liked the premise, the book ended up just being an OK read for me. I wanted a spooky "ghost in the machine" type book, but it just never quite hit the mark. The potential was there, especially in the end. However, I wanted more...more creepiness and more ghosts. I also wanted more of a peek into what Billy was doing during all of those endless work hours. The book really dragged in the middle and then the ending was rushed and anti-climatic.
The characters were kind of lack luster with Emily being the most annoying out of them all. I found her very whiny. I did like the creepy twins. They were cool and it would have made the book more interesting had they been a bigger part in the book. It's not a bad book. It's worth taking a look, but it wasn't what I was hoping for.
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