Nadia is a disgraced former cop who now runs a runs a lodge in rural Canada. She enjoys being an innkeeper, but the lodge isn't yet making enough money to support her. In order to make ends meet she works as a hitwoman for the Tommissini crime family. They pay well, don't lie to her and she knows that all the targets are bad guys. This allows Nadia to feel like she's still on the correct side of the moral line she was raised to believe in. Her only contact with other hitmen is with her mentor, a man she knows only by his professional name—-Jack.
When someone begins killing unconnected victims and leaving pages from the book Helter Skelter as a calling card the authorities suspect that the killer is a professional. The question is, why would a hitman kill so many seemingly random victims.? To get answers they begin arresting hitmen on any charges they can find, hoping to locate the killer or someone with information about him.
Jack realizes that this is very bad for business and asks Nadia to work with him and a small group of other hitmen to track down the killer and eliminate him before they all end up in jail. Nadia understands the stakes and feels like she owes Jack, so she agrees. In order to protect her real identity she takes the professional name Dee and travels around the country with Jack, working with other hitmen and using her rusty police skills to track down the killer.
The strength of this book is the characters. I have a certain fondness for stories about hitmen and I found both Nadia and Jack interesting. Not exactly likable, but interesting. Much more of Nadia's back story is revealed than Jack's and it paints a picture of a complex and difficult woman. For example, after the incident that cost Nadia her job most of her friends and family turned their backs on her and she resents that. Her anger would be reasonable if it weren't for the fact that the incident involved Nadia killing a suspect in cold blood. How did she expect people to react to that? Did she expect them to believe it was some sort of accident or mental breakdown? If so, she's expecting her loved ones to believe a lie, because she knows that isn't what happened. It's unclear if she's faulting them for not believing a lie or for not pretending to believe it, or for minding that she murdered someone and basically got away with it. The book seems to imply that Nadia herself isn't sure. That isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I found it interesting.
Unfortunately, the suspense plot was much less intriguing than the characters. The killer was pretty much who you would expect, his motivation was pretty much what you would expect and I didn't care much about any of it. As a result the book tended to drag. It's fairly long, and felt even longer because I never became absorbed enough by the story to read quickly.
Because I liked the characters I plan to read the follow up, Made to Be Broken. I'm willing to do that in part because, at least as of now, Armstrong doesn't seem to have any plans to write a longer series. If she does write more books about Nadia the plots will have to be much stronger for me to continue reading past the second book.
Grade: C
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