The Kill Club by Wendy Heard

The Kill Club by Wendy Heard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I should start this off by saying about 32.7% of me wants to actually be in the kill club, 56.3% of me is absolutely horrified by it, and 11% of me seriously wonders if someone is going to go out and try to start their own kill club after reading this. I mean, it’s practically a user’s guide for how to kill and/or fail to kill bad humans, which makes it a total breeding ground for future serial killers to converge around. Good lord, I hope that doesn’t happen, but this book does provide some sort of deranged education that could be useful to the wrong crowd.

If you’re the wrong crowd, then move along, there is nothing to see here. Also, I am not available for killing, as my calendar is quite full.

Anyway, let’s get back to the point, which is that this book is thrilling right up until the very last page. It’s dark, intense, and seriously emotional (or maybe that was just me, as I think I emotionally flailed through the whole book). Maybe we should just ignore the fact that I dropped the book quickly around page 311 and glared at it intensely for 2 days, while chewing all my fingernails to stubs, before I was able to pick it back up again and finish reading.

I am convinced that I need to be best friends with Jazz, the main character, even though she’s not really the warm, snuggly bestie type of person. In fact, I think she’d probably hate me if we met in real life. Sigh. I have to up my street cred. My Midwestern upbringing seems to be harmful to forming real and lasting literary friendships with fictional characters.

Back to the point, I effing love this book. I mean, this is how you follow up a stellar debut—with a second offering that left me guessing and stressing the whole way through. There were so many twists and turns that I just never saw coming. My adrenaline level has been so high that I haven’t slept well since I picked this book up (3 days ago). And now, it ended, and I’m still intensely anxious (thanks a lot, Wendy Heard).

It’s well-written, brilliantly plotted, and the character development is top notch. I enjoyed so many of the characters, as even the really awful people are absolutely fascinating. This book puts the characters in situations where they have to make a lot of hard decisions, and I think that’s part of why this is so phenomenal. Nobody gets an easy ride, and not knowing what will happen next or how someone will react to a situation is half the charm of the story (assuming I can call it charm, considering the story is full of brutal murder scenarios---I’m not sure what the appropriate review etiquette is for this sort of situation).

I suspect an audiobook version of this would be phenomenal (and/or emotionally debilitating), which means I have to go now, as I want to hop on over to Audible and see if I can preorder a copy.


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