Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
A painfully clunky mix of spy and crime thrillers, this really needs to decide which it wants to be. Alexandria Kingston – code name Griffin, in case you hadn’t guessed – was an abused child, with the good fortune to be rescued and brought up by Margaret Murphy, the head of Irish organized crime in Boston. Though to avoid Alex being targeted for leverage, she was never acknowledged to be part of the family. As an adult, Alex joined the CIA and became a top field agent, jet-setting over the globe on demand. But when her foster mother suffers a stroke, she returns to Boston to find herself in the middle of a war for control of the turf. The rival Killeen clan, sensing an opportunity, pounce. It’s up to Alex and her brothers to defend the family – and then take the battle to the Killeens.
It’s all utterly implausible. Apparently, the CIA don’t bother doing any kind of background check on their employees, and have no problem recruiting and giving security clearance to people with close ties to organized crime. Alex, meanwhile, wobbles uncertainly between remarkable proficiency and incompetence, as necessary to the plot. She can reel in a member of the Killeen family by simply ordering a whisky, yet this top-notch spy inexplicably can’t form sentences when faced with her former childhood sweetheart. I admit her latter burbling is actually kinda endearing, but c’mon: have some consistency in your lead character. And, of course, the Murphys are an almost saintly crime family. By which I mean, they still do prostitution and human trafficking, they just do them the right way. Yeah. About that…
This still might have made for an interesting detour in an established series, if we were already fully convinced of her talents as a CIA operative, with an unrevealed past. Instead, we get barely a handful of pages at the beginning to establish her credentials, with no real context: she exists in a vacuum. There’s also a fondness for the kind of florid consumerist prose I thought had gone out of style with Bret Easton Ellis culminating in this remarkably superfluous description of Alex’s perfume: “The sensuous bottom notes of Sri Lankan sandalwood and Indonesian patchouli were mixed with high notes of Bulgarian rose and citrus to add a feminine touch that was irresistible to the opposite sex.” I swear, I literally rolled my eyes at “high notes of Bulgarian rose”.
I can’t knock the action too much. There is a steady stream of set-pieces throughout the book, and MacDonald does describe these with a clear eye, and no shortage of savagery. [You wonder what, exactly, Boston law enforcement are doing while all this is going on, since Alex does not mess around, and the pile of bodies left in her wake is considerable. It just needs to be in the service of a much better constructed plot.
Author: Morgan Hannah MacDonald
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Griffin series.