The book started on kind of shaky ground; it wasn't poorly written, but it was very formulaic. A jump right into the action where the protagonist has a "save the cat" moment so we know she's a Good Guy, and she faces off someone who's clearly a Bad Guy because he does something evil (like threaten the life of an innocent child). Then there was an extended backstory where we learn all about Dani the Protagonist's backstory... a decorated soldier, brilliant, honorable, always does the right thing... has a loving but complicated family... yeah, we get it. She's just the best, y'know?

The other strange thing about this book is that it goes in a completely different direction about 40% of the way through. Dani is an FBI agent who is tracking down an assassin who killed the chief of staff of a prominent United States Senator, but then all of a sudden they capture him and decide to go after the man that hired him, which for some reason requires Dani to go undercover and pose as his girlfriend. But the next job they go on ends up being a trap and they end up participating in a fight-to-the-death, last-man-standing scenario.



As it happens, the assassin Dani was hunting down (his name is Toro) is actually part of an elite mercenary unit of assassins that take orders from a rogue colonel who does off-the-books missions. You know, just your run of the mill lone wolf hired killers working together from time to time like some kind of all-star Assassin Avengers.



In this case, the colonel signs up the Assassin Avengers for some sort of a VR training simulator. Only when they get there, they realize it's not actually VR nor training... it's a full on gladiatorial scenario where they're all locked in an underground facility that's a multi-level playing field full of deadly puzzles and traps controlled by someone named Nemesis who has pitted them all against one another to stream the deadly competition on the dark web.

Since Dani is a former ranger, codebreaker, and all-around badass, she excels at the game and starts piecing together the puzzle. Nemesis is clearly someone who wants the Assassin Avengers dead because of what they did on a prior mission. Meanwhile, the FBI is trying to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to find out what happened to Dani and Toro, and they figure out that the place they're being held is a decommissioned missile silo purchased by a billionaire who an axe to grind after his family was kidnapped (you get one guess who the super team was that kidnapped them!) and his wife was killed and daughter was returned... but in the inevitable twist that books like this have to have, it turns out that Nemesis is actually the billionaire's daughter who was traumatized by the kidnapping and blames the team who kidnapped her, the FBI for failing to get her back, and her father for... apparently orchestrating the whole kidnapping in the first place as a means of funneling funds (the ransom money) to the colonel to help him win some government contracts.



To sum things up, this was not a perfect novel. There were some real issues, from taking way too long to get to the point of the story to some predictable exposition work, to all the ways the character is a Mary Sue, to the predictable ending in terms of who the real mastermind was... but despite all of that, it kind of actually all worked because Dani was an interesting, consistent character. She's almost annoying in the way her inner narrative reminds us she's a Ranger and has a higher moral code than the savages she's surrounded by... but that actually comes into play in the story and her character makes certain choices as a result that are consistent for her character and affect the narrative in a positive way.

As the start of a series (second book is due out in March 2024), I actually like it better than a standalone. It makes more sense why certain aspects (like Dani's backstory, her family, her relationship with her superiors in the FBI, etc.) were focused on; in order to tell a larger and more complex story. This is the second book of Isabella Maldonado's that I've read (the first was "The Cipher"  ) and it seems like, in the three years between writing that book and this one, she's fixed a lot of the issues I had with that first book of hers I've read. She definitely figured out how to develop characters better, plot better, and tone down the unnecessary detail and description of procedural elements.

I'll definitely give the next book this series a chance.

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Created Mar 24, 2024 at 9:27pm • Submit your own review...