Another book for which many readers had a different experience than I did. Although you can read much praise for it at Amazon, I didn't care for it at all. (The readers at Goodreads seem to be much more critical, but they're not trying to sell you anything.) I liked two other books by the author, Alex Finlay (my reports here and here), well enough to pick this one up at the library.
The book opens with a grim scene: five kids from the "Savior House" foster home each firing one .22 bullet into a corpse in a makeshift grave in a dark and rainy forest. Making a pact to stay mum about it, of course.
But twenty-five years later, the kids seem to have become the target of assassins. Concentrating on three of them: Grown-up Donnie is an alcoholic rock star on decline; Nico is a reality-TV producer; Jenna is a retired contract killer with a devoted husband and a resentful teenage stepdaughter. All have near-misses with death, and must hustle to find out what's going on.
The dialog is wooden, characters are cardboard, the prose is padded and leaden, the plot is super-contrived, and lazy clichés abound. One "climactic" sequence near the book's end reads like a parody: people sneaking up behind other people, betrayals, characters-not-who-they-seem, … Everything in the book seems to be a random selection of stuff from other books.
I'll be generous and give this two stars at Goodreads.
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