Since Zero is getting some posts, I figured I would ask a question or two concerning the plot. I just re-read the book version (yay! for good stories getting published!) and I realized I didn't understand some points.
The first has to do with those guys who at one point kidnap Jack to "get to D". They seem prepared to let Jack go if they can get hold of D - at least they pretend to let Jack go - and I assume those folks were Josey's goons. But she wasn't out to just "get hold of" D - nor to blackmail him once more. She was out to make him kill Jack, and I don't see how that could be achieved by the whole kidnap scenario. Can anyone explain this?
Also I realized that the initial set-up of Josey blackmailing D was a little iffy IMO - she has half a year's worth of photos of him doing various "jobs". Granted those weren't murders of witnesses, but they nevertheless *were* premeditated murders for financial gain. Surely D would very likely have received the death penalty if she'd just handed him over with all that evidence against him? So really the whole witness-killing set-up wasn't really necessary?
And if Maria (the woman Jack saw killed) was about to testify against her hubby and the Dominguez clan, why wasn't she in protective custody too?
I think too much, I guess. My objections to the lack of logic in the bad guys' behaviour actually took away some of my enjoyment of Shades of Grey. Zero is much better, it has me wondering over some points, but never makes me roll my eyes.
And "Angel" totally used to be one of my favourite TV shows, FWIW! 
Hi Mikaela! These are all good points. I can't claim that absolutely everything in the story hangs together perfectly...it's a bit of a hazard of writing something serially. In fact, I seriously considered deleting the entire "kidnap Jack" scenario from the story for just the reason you cite, but it's such a key moment in their interpersonal relationship that I decided to let it slide.
Josey's plan, by her own admission, changed a couple of times, by necessity and as a response to D and Jack's involvement. You're right in that any of the other kills D performed could have gotten him the death penalty, but that wasn't enough for her. What she wanted was for him to break his own personal code against killing the innocent and THEN to be executed for THAT. That element of poetic justice was really what she was after.
When the initial plan went awry, when D refused to kill Jack, the plan had to change. She tried to reacquire them at the gas station...at this point she probably just wanted both of them dead. Remember that there still was a contract on Jack's life in which she was financially invested, so she would have wanted him dead as well.
Then they vanished for at least a week. During this time she would have been able to regroup and formulate a new plan. My imagining was that she staged the kidnap scheme to get D back under her control, then planned to reacquire Jack, either right then and there or a little way down the road. Then she'd either force D to kill him or kill him herself and frame D for it. Taht didn't fly thanks to Megan's interference and the boys disappeared again. And so on.
It's not perfect, plotwise. But the real point of the book is the relationship, and D's journey back to the human race, and if the reader can buy the plot enough to hang the relationship on it, it gets by. I hope.
I'll tell you, writing the sequel is proving much easier because I can write it all in one shot and make these things more clear at the outset.
