The Kill Order by Robin Burcell
My Rating: 3/5 Stars
You might say destiny brought this book and me together. I certainly didn’t discover it in the usual manner. Instead of purchasing it online, discovering it in a conference gift bag, requesting it on NetGalley, or snapping it up for free online via some form or fashion, it stared up at me from a pile of books next to the sink in the men’s bathroom in Albany, NY. Crazy, right? Well, I didn’t have to think too long and hard about it, since free books and I go about as well together as sugar and cocoa beans.
This book proved to be more thriller than suspense, and it certainly managed to hold my attention with a heroine that has a bit of a backbone and a quirky nature. Sydney Fitzpatrick may fail at relationships, but she’s not going to fail when it comes to protecting colleagues and individuals, and that’s why it was rather easy to rally behind her, even if she did make a mistake or two along the way. The world may have Armageddon on its doorstep, but she’s not about to back off. And I wasn’t about to back down from THE KILL ORDER.
It captured my attention right away, and I managed to hold on to the side of the cliff with what was left of my fingernails. Dangling on the side of a precipice, I could have used a string of random numbers and possibly a rope and a woman with more than a bit of gumption on the other end who has enough wherewithal to accept the challenge of pulling me back to safety.
Piper Lawrence proved to be an intriguing character. Saddled with eidetic memory, this allows her to remember strings of random numbers as soon as she reads them, more than a dozen license plates with effortless ease, or recite entire pages from Shakespeare after one perusal, which makes her an absolute hit at drinking parties. Even if she has few friends and even fewer people who understand her true talents, it’s hard not to soften your heart when she enters the picture and rally behind her with both hands placed firmly in front of you.
The dialogue punched and sang and clanged together effortlessly and easily; the story railed away at my senses; the characters fit together rather seamlessly. But I did find myself questioning the likelihood of the storyline, and I would have preferred more jagged edges, instead of the pieces fitting together a bit too easily.
I received this ARC for free at Bouchercon (via the men’s bathroom).