Where to start with this book?

I'm only on page 28, and you might be expecting me to say it's terrible and there's a bad love triangle, an awful romance. Well, there isn't. Yet. But I'm waiting for it.

The word I would use to describe this book is a completely different one, and to be honest, one that I wouldn't really have used for Meyer before.

B
O
R
I
N
G

Those pages are some of the most boring I've ever read in my life. I mean, Twilight's bad. But at least it gets you to laugh at how terrible and incompetent it is. It's so bad it keeps you hooked. Same with The Host. I wanted to see if she could fuck up any more, if she could make it any worse with the ending.
But I had to keep forcing myself to read The Chemist. I found myself so bored that I kept accidentally skipping lines and barely noticing. That's how boring this book is. To show you how much pointless description there is, there's no dialogue at all until page 21.

Back of the book:

In this gripping page-turner, an ex-agent on the run from her former employers must take one more case to clear her name and save her life.

She used to work for the U.S. government, but very few people ever knew that. An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn't even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning.

Now she rarely stays in the same place or uses the same name for long. They've killed the only other person she trusted, but something she knows still poses a threat. They want her dead, and soon.

When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it's her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers. To her horror, the information she acquires only makes her situation more dangerous.

Resolving to meet the threat head-on, she prepares for the toughest fight of her life but finds herself falling for a man who can only complicate her likelihood of survival. As she sees her choices being rapidly whittled down, she must apply her unique talents in ways she never dreamed of.

In this tautly plotted novel, Meyer creates a fierce and fascinating new heroine with a very specialized skill set. And she shows once again why she's one of the world's bestselling authors.

So it starts off with "the woman currently calling herself Chris Taylor."

Today's errand had become routine for the woman who was currently calling herself Chris Taylor.

It gives a boring description of the things she does, then a boring description of her driving her ordinary and boring car, a boring description of her going to the library. Have I said "boring" enough times yet?
She gets tips from spy books, which is why she wants them. Seriously.
It's written in third person, which is weird for Stephenie Meyer. Chris doesn't want to risk making a library account because unspecified people want her dead. So she, and I shit you not, takes a knife and cuts off a "magnetic scanner" off all the books so she can steal them.

Like.....what? You do know you can just put them in your fucking bag? Are libraries so strict in America that they actually have a system on the book that beeps if you leave without checking them out?
Then she goes on a computer - WITHOUT PAYING, I might add. Now that's something that would make a librarian pissed. She checks her emails. You know, for somebody whose life is supposedly in danger, she's not very smart.
She never thinks about the fact that they're probably tracking her fucking email account. I mean, if they're good villains at all. She has an email from a guy she used to know when she was working for the government, a guy who now wants her dead. Yep. When I want someone dead I just send them an email.

Then she goes home and we get a boring description of her boring house and all the security measures on it - bars on the window, bags of fake blood in her pillowcases, some kind of fake body on her bed so that if someone goes for the bed first, they'll think they've killed her, at least for a minute. But the second the body is disrupted, she gets an alert on her ipad from where she's sleeping in the bath, and it will wake her up so she has time to escape........ok then. How is she going to escape when there are bars on the windows? No idea.
She also wears a gas mask when she's sleeping - why? I don't know. In case someone tries to gas her?

Then she climbs into her sleeping bag in her bath, with her gun and her ipad and tries to sleep, and here's where it gets really confusing. In the next chapter, she's using the name Casey and she's on a mission. Haven't a clue what the mission is. Don't even know what's going on. Is this a flashback? A dream? Is it the next day? I don't know.

So she's in a hotel for some reason and I hate that everything she owns is a weapon. For fuck's sake, even the chain of her necklace can "garrotte a man."
Stephenie Meyer clearly doesn't know much about spy thrillers. Neither do I, admittedly. But it's pissing me off. This girl is like fucking MacGyver, she can make anything out of anything. She's even made a booby trap in her house by doing some shit with washing machine parts and a YouTube tutorial. I'm not even joking. She literally has washing machine parts and fucks around with them until she has a trap made.

Ok, so I've read on from page 28 now and things are a tiny bit clearer. I think that was a flashback and now we're back to normal?
Chris who was Casey is now Alex (I know) and she's on one last case. The guy who emailed her was actually her old boss, and she's told her target is this guy named Daniel Beach. Apparently he's wanted for something? Maybe?
So she starts watching this guy Daniel. Right off the bat, I'm calling a creepy romance. Right off the fucking bat.
She finds out all this boring stuff about him, like the fact that he's divorced. Lalllalallalalalalalallalala boring boring BORING. Her real name is Julianna, boring, boring, I DON'T CARE. So she was reviewing the footage of the murderer guy or whatever and he looks just like Daniel except she thinks that he holds himself differently, and his fingers look different lengths and tbh he doesn't look like the same guy. Think of every cliche ever.
Yup, that's what I'm thinking of too.

I guarantee it's twins.

So now they're talking because she followed him into a train, but she doesn't want him to talk to her.

It felt both creepy and dangerous to be fraternising with her next job.

I'm still not sure what her job is. Does she arrest people? Or does she kill them? Is she an assassin or a cop?
All we get is that she's an "agent."

To be honest, I'm not even angry at how bad this book is. It's just making me want to sleep.
She's using the name Jesse but when he asks her, she tells him her name is Alex.
Wait for this wondrous, unpredictable scene.

"Nice to meet you, Alex. Look, I never do this - ever. But... well, why not? Can I give you my number? Maybe we could have dinner sometime?"
She stared at him in blank shock. A man was hitting on her. No, not a man. A soon-to-be mass murderer working for a psychotic drug czar.
Or an agent trying to distract her?

WHAT THE FUCK IS HER JOB? WHAT IS AN AGENT? DOES SHE WORK FOR SOMETHING LIKE MI5?

So he writes his number down on a receipt with a no.2 pencil, because the description of the pencil is important.
So the bus jostles and she stabs him with a syringe so he gets all faint and she helps him off the train where the drug makes him all dreamy and shit and he tells her he likes her face.

So Daniel's unconscious, and she takes him to her "temporary lab."
A question I have is where the fuck she's getting all of this money. If she's living off the grid and doesn't have a credit card and wants to stay off the radar then.....wtf?
Does she have a bank account? If so, isn't she concerned they'll empty it? (Whoever "they" are, because it's not really been explained) The barn is full of MacGyver shit. She cuts his shirt off to check for a tracking device, but notices he has muscles. Oh Stephenie, you're so predictable. Turns out "The Chemist" is her code name.
She ties him to a table and just randomly has an IV drip that she connects him to. And then when he wakes up she tells him she's going to start torturing him.

"Um, is this some sort of fetish fantasy thing? I don't really know the rules for that stuff...."

What a gobshite.

Fair enough, her "torturing" mainly consists of just sticking sharp objects into weird and complicated medical words I don't understand. He cries a bit and tells her he didn't do it.
She feels really uncomfortable because she's "starting to feel things."

More boring, boring description. THIS IS SO FUCKING BORING.
Some guy randomly drops in. He's wearing a mask and he has a dog and says he's looking for Daniel.
The dog is called Einstein. Like....

Oh wow, look who it is. Daniel's twin. Kevin. Never saw that coming 🙃
He sees that Daniel's bleeding and he punches Alex in the face. As per usual.
Stephenie, are you ok? Is your husband hitting you?

Alex keeps calling Kevin Batman. It's not fucking funny. Stephenie Meyer keeps writing dialogue that I think was supposed to be witty and clever, but really it's just cliche and pathetic.
For instance: Kevin keeps calling his twin brother "kid."

Daniel thought Kevin was dead, ffs, could you be any more cliche?
Kevin calls Alex crazy, for some reason Daniel defends her? They kinda fight a bit. Daniel is pissed that Kevin punched Alex.
Kevin's in the CIA, so he knows about agenty shit. For some reason, everyone's forgotten he killed a load of people and now they're sorta friends.
This is so fucking boring.

They go off in a car. Daniel asks Kevin how many people he's killed. Kevin says about 45, but nobody really gives a shit. Alex says she's killed 3.
So they arrive at a motel place and get a room with only one bed -_-
Alex says she'll take a chair because she'll be on lookout or whatever. Her face is all bruised and shit but you know Stephenie Meyer.

They go to another weird safe house and Kevin is still trying to be cool by calling people stupid nicknames - he calls Alex "Killer" and Daniel "Shorty."
My thing with Kevin is just like:

Oh my God, this book is so boring. I'm trying to stay sane by finding fun gifs but guys, it's getting close to breaking point. These bastards are driving me crazy. They get new dogs, yay.
They're trying to train Daniel, who doesn't seem to care that one of them tortured him and the other one killed a bunch of people and set up offshore accounts under his name so "agents" went after his twin instead.

So now she's explaining to Daniel why she's an "agent."
Apparently she was training as a doctor but these super mysterious guys turned up.

"These mysterious government officials turned up and offered me an opportunity. They picked up the tab for my student loans and when I graduated, I went to work in their lab. It was obvious what they had me creating."

So basically they got her to create antibiotics? Oooook.
She notices Daniel is left handed, and quizzes him about Kevin being right handed. Daniel launches into this explanation of how they're basically "mirror twins", and tbh, he's lost me already.

"Our faces aren't exactly the same unless you look at one as a reflection."

???????
Then he says he'll be in trouble if he ever needs an organ transplant, because "all of my insides are reversed."

Like.....wtf? Is this even a real thing?
He goes on to say that he'll need an organ from a fellow reversed twin who happens to be a genetic match.

I'M GOING TO LOOK THIS UP.

Oops ok, so that is a real thing. Forgive me if I thought it was some shitty thing Meyer made up.

They have dinner together because Kevin's fucked off somewhere, and Daniel starts telling her random science shit about attraction. Guess what, he's attracted to her. She says she doesn't really believe in love and that sort of shit, cue pages and pages of boring dialogue and tedious description. Daniel isn't violent like the guys in Stephenie Meyer's other books. No, instead of beating you to death, I think Daniel would bore you to death.

They kiss but they don't have sex because Stephenie Meyer is very against things like that in books and very innocent. She prefers when guys slam you up against a wall and molest you.
So Daniel's on the news, and the newsreader says police think he's been kidnapped.
Ahem. Daniel is a GROWN MAN. Usually police don't believe adults are kidnapped right off the fucking bat.
Alex thinks that it's these mysterious assassiny "agents" trying to flush him out.
I don't know where the fuck Kevin is. I don't really care.

So they sleep together - NO SEXUAL CONNOTATIONS, THEY JUST SLEEP IN THE SAME BED BECAUSE THEY'RE LONELY, YOU DIRTY MINDED FREAKS!!!!!!!! HOW COULD YOU THINK PURE LITTLE STEPHENIE WOULD EVER WRITE ANYTHING LIKE THAT?????

My will to live is dropping.