Hired to Kill Review

This week I decided to break away from the genres I usually read and took a look at Hired to Kill by Brian K Carr. As you can probably guess by the title, the story is a crime thriller.

Hired to Kill centres around Colin O'Brien, a normal guy living in southern California. Unfortunately for Colin, but somewhat darkly funny for the reader, he gets mistaken as a famous assassin and is asked to carry out a hit. Common sense would usually dictate to most people to just walk away, but when you are offered $1,000,000, as Colin puts it, it "can really skew your prerogatives in life".

Colin falls into the deep end of the criminal underworld, being chased by feds, grumpy Russians and seemingly the angriest mall staff in the western hemisphere. It quickly transpires though that there is much more behind the hit that the mysterious Monica Stafford wants Colin to carry out than she is letting on.

Colin is a very likeable character and often left stumbling and staggering his way through each deadly situation as best he can; but considering his knowledge of crime lords and weapons is only limited to what he has seen on CSI and in the movies, he tries his best. Let's be honest, most people, me included, would likely be the exact same - that's assuming that you had not already been shot.

Author Brian K Carr also impresses with his knowledge of weaponry. I do not know a lot about guns and I hate when books just drop in the name of a weapon and then assumes the reader knows what it looks like and what it does. The author doesn't do that here, which is nice. The descriptions of the weapons are highly detailed and it helps you to really appreciate why Colin and the other characters are using different weapons in different situations.

Colin can also be quite funny too, usually dropping in comments about crime movies he has watched just after someone has tried to kill him. You quickly learn that it's his way of dealing with a nerve-wracking situation.

However, I do feel Colin is the only real interesting character in the book. I found some of the others quite bland, especially his friends Freddie and Ray. I don't feel there was enough personality behind them.

Something else that sticks in my mind is why Colin always seems to go for a three course meal just after someone has tried to kill him. One of my favourite scenes is when there is a shootout in the mall, which then spills out into the car park. You genuinely fear for Colin's safety and he only just makes it out alive...and the first thing he does afterwards is go and have something to eat. Would anyone really do that?
If someone had just tried to kill me, the last thing I would want to be doing is eating food. I would probably he curled up in a ball somewhere, rocking myself back and forth.

But besides Colin's insatiable appetite and a lack of depth to some of the characters, Hired to Kill is a solid read with a lot of good humour, fast pace and stunning action scenes.
Overall, I give it 7/10.

Hired to Kill is available through Kindle here.