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A review by mad_about_books
Deadly Messengers by Susan May
5.0
I read to be entertained, and I read to be informed. Whether reading a piece of fiction or non-fiction, I actually want a bit of both. When I am engaged and turning pages and the urge to fact check a concept interrupts me, that's a good read. While reading DEADLY MESSENGERS, that is exactly what happened! (A sort of spoiler: there is a YouTube video mentioned by name. Said video is real. I watched it.) I don't do real spoilers, so what I may have Googled to do a bit of fact checking will have to remain my secret.
It is most important for a writer to have a unique voice to stand out in the crowd. That unique voice often expresses itself by presenting the story from an unexpected perspective. Susan May's voice is crystal clear and loud enough to reach you on page one. What might she be saying? Reader! Pay attention!
Kendall Jennings is a strong, but flawed, female character. Honestly, I prefer my characters, both male and female, flawed. It makes them believable because real people are flawed. Here we have a stand alone novel populated with very real characters. Folks you might meet at sometime in your life. I mention that is is a stand alone novel because at several points I found myself thinking that this is a story with characters that have lives, and lives go on.
If you read the author bio on Amazon, you will see that Susan May hails from Australia, so you might think she would put her story in a locale down under. Not so. DEADLY MESSENGERS is set in a fictitious city in the U. S. You know this because guns are readily available, the FBI is mentioned, and the subject is mass murder. Where else on earth would multiple mass murders even make for a believable story? There are occasional places in the book where she may not get the Americanism just right but when you are reading a thriller like this one, who cares about such trivia. This is. without a doubt, one of the best books I have read this year. If I could give it six stars, I certainly would!
On a technical note, I did find several places where a word seemed like it had been left out of a sentence, the tense of a verb didn't seem to fit, a singular noun that should have been plural... They seemed like the kind of mistakes made when thinking faster than one is able to commit them to page. My brain made the corrections so quickly they really didn't much interrupt the flow of this very fast paced novel.
The bottom line is this is a book well worth the time you spend reading it.
This review is based on the ARC sent to me by Susan May.
It is most important for a writer to have a unique voice to stand out in the crowd. That unique voice often expresses itself by presenting the story from an unexpected perspective. Susan May's voice is crystal clear and loud enough to reach you on page one. What might she be saying? Reader! Pay attention!
Kendall Jennings is a strong, but flawed, female character. Honestly, I prefer my characters, both male and female, flawed. It makes them believable because real people are flawed. Here we have a stand alone novel populated with very real characters. Folks you might meet at sometime in your life. I mention that is is a stand alone novel because at several points I found myself thinking that this is a story with characters that have lives, and lives go on.
If you read the author bio on Amazon, you will see that Susan May hails from Australia, so you might think she would put her story in a locale down under. Not so. DEADLY MESSENGERS is set in a fictitious city in the U. S. You know this because guns are readily available, the FBI is mentioned, and the subject is mass murder. Where else on earth would multiple mass murders even make for a believable story? There are occasional places in the book where she may not get the Americanism just right but when you are reading a thriller like this one, who cares about such trivia. This is. without a doubt, one of the best books I have read this year. If I could give it six stars, I certainly would!
On a technical note, I did find several places where a word seemed like it had been left out of a sentence, the tense of a verb didn't seem to fit, a singular noun that should have been plural... They seemed like the kind of mistakes made when thinking faster than one is able to commit them to page. My brain made the corrections so quickly they really didn't much interrupt the flow of this very fast paced novel.
The bottom line is this is a book well worth the time you spend reading it.
This review is based on the ARC sent to me by Susan May.