Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½
“Meet Holly Lin. Nanny by day, assassin by night.” That was the tagline here, and you’ll understand why it jumped off the Amazon page and onto my Kindle. I was expecting something like Mary Poppins crossed with Atomic Blonde [“A spoonful of C-4 helps the terrorists go down…”], which is a great concept. However, I guess I’m going to have to write that book myself, because this isn’t it. I suppose, technically it is, though may be closer to like “vaguely nannies some times, assassin at others”. It certainly helps in terms of workplace schedule flexibility, that she nannies for her government boss. So it’s apparently fine when she has to abandon her charges and jet off from Washington to Las Vegas to assassinate someone selling a flash drive, on which is… Well, we’ll get back to that.
Holly also had a tendency to go off-mission, riding off into the Nevada desert on her own to rescue a bunch of sex-trafficked women. That’s a decision that comes back to haunt her later on, though it’s extraordinarily convenient how all the bad guys seem to know and work with each other. They must have a villains’ Facebook group or something. The other major issue is the shift in focus. In the second half, the main antagonist becomes someone who was only mentioned in flashback/passing in the first. There’s little or no emotional resonance to the conflict as a result. Though if you can’t guess the identity of the mysterious figure who spares Holly’s life in an alley, you probably need to read more of this genre.
Swartwood has a better handle on the action, with a number of well-written and fast-paced set pieces, and a heroine who has no problem using brutal violence as a tool. However, the underlying logic on both sides is often questionable. The climax occurs after Holly’s charges are kidnapped and ransomed, held in exchange for that pesky flash drive. Yet the way in which she goes about retrieving it, seems more designed for spectacle than good sense – and she needn’t even have bothered, since the villain agrees to meet her without requiring any kind of proof she has it. These kind of missteps bedevil the story. Though I did appreciate the final, savage payoff to the running thread about the elevator in her apartment building being slow or out of order.
There just isn’t enough here to make it stand out from the pack of other assassins-with-a-heart-of-gold-and-a-troubled-past books. If it had played up the “double life” concept – making Holly some kind of bad-ass baby-sitter – this could have been a novel angle. Instead, it hardly gets much of a look-in, and as a final insult [probably a spoiler, but I don’t care] Swartwood can’t even be bothered to tell us what is actually on the flash drive to cause such mayhem and bloodshed. It’s a complete McGuffin. Unfortunately, this author is no Hitchcock.
Author: Robert Swartwood
Publisher: RMS Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Holly Lin series.