Bloody
I found this book digging for something in English in a box with books "zu verschenken" left by a good soul on the street. I did not make any idea what it was about if I should not read just due pure prejudice. I was never a big fan of action/spy stories until I met "Victor"! I got so into this book that for a couple of times I lost the train stop I should leave because I was reading. I carried the book everywhere to read in all free spots I had. Once I forgot the book in the gym, I am a really unregular visitant of the gym, but in the week I lost the book, I was there almost every day trying to retrieve it without success. So I bought the same book again just to know to end.
This book actually is the third one from a series that Tom Wood started to write in 2010. Since then he has been producing almost one book per year so now we have seven of them. All of them with Victor as the protagonist: the most motherfucker assassin of the world! Victor is cold as the German winter, so cold that at a certain point I hypothesized he was a kind of psychopath. I even asked Tom Wood in his profile in Goodreads if he thinks Victor is a psychopath and he gave enough arguments to think Victor is not. More than Victor's ability to kill is his capacity to predict and avoid to be killed. He is all the time expecting to be killed what gives him an amazing perception of what moves around him and if the scene he is in contains a threat. The way Victor does perceive threats is beautifully described. Indeed one of the highlights of the book.
The action scenes are another great point, so greatly done that I can feel the blood's smell! I have the impression that Tom Wood does not waste a line describing something that is not important for the whole picture of the scene. In my perspective, the description looks precise and succinct. The succinctness is what brings an amazing dynamic upon the narrative, a paragraph is never a waste of time. I particularly hate massive rich descriptions, for me they are dispensable. It was exactly the overdone details that make me quit reading "The Game of Thrones" in the first book not further than the third chapter. By the end of the third chapter, I was not able to remember the name of the characters in the first. It was exhausting, I felt mentally abused! This is definitively not the case of "The Game": no thrones and much more action!
The problem is that Victor is so good at what he does that it does not look real. Okay, the book is a fiction, but Victor is supposed to be human, no superpowers, right? Sometimes it looks like he has. The certainty that he is going to be alive in the end of the book breaks a bit of the suspense. Being sure that Victor is going to survive even when he is in a deep shitty trouble breaks the surprise effect. At this point, I just think: "okay, how is he going to escape this time?". Appart of the predictability, I can not get enough of Victor. I already bought the first book and the idea is going through all the seven of them as soon as possible! I am really looking forward writing about the other books!
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