A Killer’s Game
A Killer’s Game (Daniela Vega #1)
By: Isabella Maldonado
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2023]
[Fulfilled ‘Book with a person running away on the cover’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]
“Before leaving the Army, Vega had served in their most elite combat unit, where she had smashed through closed doors, glass ceilings, and preconceived notions. Wu had no doubt she was more than qualified for this assignment. Her only challenge would be dealing with Toro, whose loyalty was only to himself.”
I am a big fan of Maldonado’s Nina Guerrero series so I knew I had to read her newest book, A Killer’s Game.
The book started off a bit slow as it laid the groundwork for the rest of the book, but the pace picked up and Maldonado created, yet again, a suspenseful story with a tough and heroic female protagonist and a formidable opponent.
If you can get past the alphabet soup of organizations and abbreviations, you’ll really enjoy this high-stakes game of survival.
The basic premise is:
After capturing a hired assassin, Toro, who just killed (using a toxin) the right-hand man to a high profile politician the FBI/NYPD joint task force gets him to turn state’s evidence.
In order to take down the highest player in this mysterious ring they get Toro to bring FBI agent Daniela Vega into the group undercover. But things go south quickly and Toro and Vega are off-grid….
Until they show up in a ‘VR’ game on the dark-web— a contained, modern version of The Hunger Games— where this band of hired mercenaries have been led into a trap: a fight to the death in an underground bunker of mazes and puzzles where only one survives.
Can Vega’s team track her down before she becomes the next victim? Can she trust Toro to help her outsmart Nemesis, the game-maker?
With some of the puzzles it reminded me of Maldonado’s book, The Cipher. I enjoy plots that involve puzzles and riddles. Some of the puzzles in this book were good and I was even able to solve a few of them. I liked in the beginning when they cracked the cipher using the date-shift-code which would be easy enough to replicate on your own but still complicated to solve.
But then there were a few that were too simple: the one with the color circles is meant to be some sort of complicated logic puzzle but the clue they are given gives the answer away too easily and all you really need is one line to solve it - Ignore caution and go. Boom. Choose the green one. Simple. But even the way she wrote the characters thinking through it didn’t jive with how brilliant Vega was written to be.
I would have liked to see some more complex puzzles for her to solve.
A couple other plot points that I wish would have gotten an upgrade in the editing process were:
The parking garage fiasco. I feel like if you’re tailing a car and they go into an underground parking garage, you just expect that there could be a vehicle change but they seemed caught off guard that they followed the wrong car and never even anticipated a switch. It’s par for the course in literally every movie so I wish that would have been a little different.
And just the overall perception the FBI had of the bad guys as if they were surprised by the sophistication and covertness of their operation when in reality pretty much everything they did seemed pretty by-the-book when it comes to bad guys.
But those are just a few nit-picky things. I like really intelligent characters in books, but then I have high expectations for the complexity they take on and want the case to fully reflect their brilliance in how they perceive and solve things.
Even still, this book was still well-written and action-packed.
I’m looking forward to the next book in this series. We got a little background to Vega’s character and a brief look into her family, but I’m hoping to see more of that in the next one. Perhaps her brother will become a bigger player in the next one.
I was able to figure out who Nemesis was fairly early on, but it seems like a lot of readers couldn’t so I think the mystery will keep most people engaged until the last few pages.
Even though I knew who the killer was I still didn’t know how the ‘game’ was going to end or if they would be able to capture Nemesis so I appreciated that the suspense was action-based not just information-based.
I would definitely recommend this book— or any Maldonado book for that matter. Her experience in the FBI and law enforcement gives a lot of authenticity to the characters, plot, and dialogue. Plus her books are generally pretty clean with minimal swearing which I always appreciate as well.
Her books are good examples of how you can write a good thriller without a lot of unnecessary content.
Also, if you like the concept of characters stuck in a ‘game’ where they have to escape deadly traps and puzzles, you may enjoy these books (which I guess are mostly Ted Dekker books…)_:
House by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti (this and Skin are somewhat similar, they also have a supernatural aspect)
Skin by Ted Dekker
Play Dead by Ted Dekker (this one has an virtual game aspect)
The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (It’s on my TBR; looks like this involves a mansion with secret passageways and puzzles/riddles)
[Content Advisory: 11 f-words, 19 s-words; no sexual content]
**Received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.**
This book releases June 1, 2023. You can pre-order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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