“The first rule of Murder Club, you don’t talk about Murder Club.” Jasmine Benavides
The Kill Club follows a young woman named Jazz, who lived with her brother Joaquin until their fanatical and zealous foster mother Carol threw Jazz out of the house. With Jazz out of the house, Carol’s zealotry goes to extremes, endangering Joaquin’s life in the process. Jazz has tried to get child services to intervene with no luck. And now, time seems to be running out.
Then, Jazz receives a phone call from a stranger, offering to take care of the problem for her. If Jazz agrees, she’ll become part of a network of people who are taking back their power by doing what the system has failed to do.
All Jazz has to do is kill a stranger in return. And that’s where things go terribly, terribly wrong.
For me, The Kill Club was an unputdownable thriller with plenty of heart-in-your-throat moments. I thought the premise of the story was brilliant: having an anonymous stranger take down a scumbag such as a serial abuser, rapist, etc. and in exchange, you’re expected to kill someone else’s scumbag. It’s vigilante justice at its finest.
But when things go horribly wrong for Jazz, there’s then an insidious stomach-churning undercurrent of dread that truly made for an addictive reading experience. I could feel her terror and tension escalate with the numerous plot twists until the final surprising pages of the story.
I thought the intensity and poignancy of the relationship between Joquin and Jazz was believable as well as heartfelt, and the depth of it, caused me to really care about what happened to them and to root for their success throughout the story. Jazz was a delightful heroine: determined, brave, independent, relatable, and entirely devoted to Joquin. For me, the most poignant element of this story is the profoundly selfless love demonstrated by Jasmine for Joquin, which asks the questions: “How far are we willing to go for someone we love?”
All in all, I loved this diabolically clever story. Wendy Heard has written a captivating, haunting, and mesmerizing novel here. It’s a high-stakes novel that’s creepy, unsettling, and I couldn’t put it down.
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