Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Keepin it real!, 8 Oct 2006
When Evan Delaney's father goes missing hours after leaving her home, she finds herself thrown into a world of hookers, assassins and double crosses. As she struggles to gather information that will help save her father, she must fight to clear her name while trying to discover who is behind the attempts on her life.
Kill Chain is a great read, a book that starts slow but steadily builds up momentum until it speeds along with such furious pace that you can't let go. Towards the end you'll find yourself pushing for `just one more chapter' before you turn the light off.
As Evan, our heroine, travels the globe in search of answers, we discover just how real she is. She doesn't know kung-fu, drive fast cars or walk around shooting the bad guys. Instead she deals with the situation as you or I would. She's normal and believable, helping the reader feel for her in her most desperate situations.
Although this is the fifth in a series, nothing felt like it was missing thanks to Meg Gardiner filling in the required blanks. In fact, these flashes of past stories that make you want to go back and explore Evan's past.
Kill Chain is a story about how far we'll go to protect our loved ones and what we must sacrifice to do this. Anyone who loves reading adventure will enjoy Kill Chain.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Putting Life on Hold, 15 Nov 2006
Putting life on hold...that's what Evan Delaney does in this latest thriller from Meg Gardiner. It's also what you'll do once you pick up the book. Once snared, it's hard to get free as you jet around the globe with Evan in a race against time.
Lives are at risk, lives are lost, baddies abound (real baddies, not just paper-mache cutouts), and Evan finds that the world she knew is not reality...at least not where her father is concerned.
Battling the clock and her own uncertainties, finding that she must hide from the bad guys, the good guys, and Jesse...Evan must put it all on the line to survive.
As an avid reader of the Evan Delaney thrillers, I find this to be the best adventure yet. I'm delighted to see the story expanded onto a broader canvas. Much as I love Santa Barbara, Evan's hometown, I enjoy seeing her racing around the globe even more.
Gardiner's writing is vivid and relentlessly taut.
Fasten your seatbelts -- yet again!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The times, they are a-changin'..., 4 Nov 2006
"Kill Chain", the fifth book in Meg Gardiner's series featuring Evan Delaney, establishes beyond question the legs for many more stories with these characters and offers up fresh possibilities at a point where many series often come unstuck. Gardiner's thrillers are tough, honest and heartfelt, and the severe emotional kicking that was the second half of "Crosscut" marked an increased maturity in both her writing and the issues her books confront - a maturity that is carried over to "Kill Chain" from the very first page: you are left in no doubt from the offset that things are going to change.
This is at heart a good old-fashioned race-against-time thriller that starts you off at a run and builds an almost irresistible momentum as it tears through its various mysteries and locations on the way to a tense and surprising showdown. Gardiner sidesteps the potential flaw of rendering her travelogue virtually irrelevant in this rush by exploring the locations in conjunction with the plot, making them a key part of proceedings rather than simply trying to distract us with new scenery. From the streets of Bangkok to a terrific sequence on the London Underground, she amps up the intrigue with a keen eye for her settings and a barrage of thrills, including what is probably the most nonchalant use of a chair as a weapon ever written.
Gardiner is a writer of great talent, filling proceedings with the kind of emotional richness that really marks her books out for me, and reminding us of the humanity and fallibility of her characters with effortless asides. She also juggles the various story elements - among them the imminent sense of threat throughout, an at times literal countdown and the changing emotional commitments of various characters - with consummate skill, and is not afraid to leave certain things hanging come the end (in a move that left me itching for the next one, so I hope she gets to it before too long!).
So, why not five stars? Well, I've come to expect great things of Ms. Gardiner after her last three books, and this can feel almost a little too convenient in places. The importance of this book in the context of the series is indisputable, and it is expertly paced and marshalled throughout, but I would now like to see Gardiner's writing shift up to the next level of which she is so clearly capable. I'd easily put this up against anything else being written today, and urge anyone who has yet to read Gardiner's books to start as soon as possible.
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