Twisted is a debut novel by a talented author. The plot is clever, the premise intriguing, and the pacing steady. But I still found issues with Twisted that hindered my enjoyment of the book.

The characters of this novel were extremely stereotyped. Retro, the love interest, is the typical playboy jock, his sister an overly cute fashionista, the computer geek a complete nerd, and the love rival, Carma, a terrible Drama Queen. The only character with shades of grey was Lola. This makes the story unrealistic.

But let's return to the love rival, Carma. The addition of Carma turned a spiced, exciting spy novel to a melodramatic High School Musical parody, complete with locker fights and teacher gossip--extremely distasteful.

In fact, the actual spy action was limited. There were a few missions, but they were poorly executed--nothing close to the actual efficiency of modern espionage. The mission scenes lacked tense pacing and suspense.

Finally, the author's writing style. In a word, loquacious. The biggest issues seemed to be unnecessary modifiers--such as 'shouted loudly' or 'said happily and joyfully'--and the balance of sentence styles, which was completely off. There were too many complex sentences, and not enough simple or compound.

Overall, Twisted is a fun book, but not the electrifying read I'd expected. I'd recommend it as a light read.