The Scorch Trials by James Dashner

Because I'm a glutton for punishment I continued on with the series. I was not left completely wanting, but I did find more questions than answers yet again. Is the old maxim third time the charm really true? I truly hope so because I really need some answers to how this series was a bestseller.

Sitting pretty in a bunker with comfortable beds, clean clothes, and plenty of food, Thomas and the Gladers are ready to find out why they have been living in a maze for two years. Why they have been modified to remember only the basics of human functionality. Why they have these tattoos on their necks. The frustration is palpable as the reader ends up experiencing it right along with Thomas.

Bad news, kids. The testing is not over. The cure is not even close to being formulated, and we have infected you with the humanity genocide virus. You will be thrown out as another trial phase 100% aware we are monitoring you. But you won't know which part are tests and which are just figments of the environment. You must also complete all of this while missing a member. Meet Aris, the only boy from all girl Group B. He will be replacing Teresa.

The Gladers are banished from the cushy WICKED bunker into the tunnel of death only to enter the Scorch. The zone between the tropics that were hit the worst by the solar flares that devastated the planet. There is nothing but heat, dust, and infected. It is, after all, the place that the world felt most comfortable dropping all the people infected with the Flare.

The Gladers plus Aris have two weeks to cross this wasteland of insanity and cannibalism. Extreme bad weather and complete lunatics are traumatic enough, but then Thomas is separated from his group with a complete stranger, Brenda. Trials bind they say, and Thomas starts to feel angsty emotions towards Brenda and Teresa and can't quite sort himself out. So when he is kidnapped by Teresa, it is a whole smorgasbord of relationship issues. 

Thomas realizes he has finally had enough of WICKED and sets his resolve to get himself and the Gladers free of their influence and testing.

All of that sounds like it should be interesting and action-packed. Unfortunately, the pages are hard to turn as each new paragraph is not an explanation but more dialogue and intrigue. If a problem is solved, it is done so in the background; no reasoning or rationale on the foreground. Even with a creative imagination it is disappointing when the author leaves a plot hanging.