Thank you to MIRA books for the complimentary advance readers copy and the opportunity to review this book. All opinions are my own.
About the Book:
Jazz will stop at nothing to save her brother.
Their foster mother, Carol, has always been fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol takes a dangerous turn that threatens thirteen-year-old Joaquin’s life. Over and over, child services fails to intervene, and Joaquin is running out of time.
Then Jazz gets a blocked call from someone offering a solution. There are others like her—people the law has failed. They’ve formed an underground network of “helpers,” each agreeing to eliminate the abuser of another. They’re taking back their power and leaving a trail of bodies throughout Los Angeles—dubbed the Blackbird Killings. If Jazz joins them, they’ll take care of Carol for good.
All she has to do is kill a stranger.
My Thoughts:
I gave this book 3 stars.
This book was a bit of a slow starter for me and definitely seemed like a slight rip-off of The Chain Similar premise–an anonymous person contacts you to kill someone, and in turn someone in your life that you want to be rid of will be killed. I had a lot of logistical questions about this book, and the ultimate person behind the murder club was a head-scratcher and didn’t make much sense.
I liked Jazz and Joaquin and their parts of the story elevated the tale beyond all of the cat-and-mouse chasing. Overall though, the suspense and mystery are not the strong portion of the tale, the relationships are. I might check out another book by this author in the future, I just think that the suspense needs to be fine-tuned quite a bit more in a further novel. I liked her book Hunting Annabelle and think the author’s plotting is quite unique, but in that book as well, I liked the journey much better than the way it concluded.
