On Sale Date: December 17, 2019
9780778309031, 0778309037
Trade Paperback
$15.99 USD, $19.99 CAD
Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological
368 pages
Jazz can’t let her younger brother die.
Their foster mother Carol has always been
fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol takes a dangerous
turn that threatens thirteen-year-old Joaquin’s life. Over and over, child
services fails to intervene, and Joaquin is running out of time.
Then Jazz gets a blocked call from someone
offering a solution. There are others like her, people the law has failed.
They’ve formed an underground network of “helpers,” each agreeing to murder the
abuser of another. They're taking back their power and leaving a trail of bodies
throughout Los Angeles—dubbed the Blackbird Killings. If Jazz joins them,
they’ll take care of Carol for good.
All she has to do is kill a stranger.
Jazz soon learns there's more to fear than
getting caught carrying out her assignment. The leader of the club has a zero
tolerance policy for mistakes.
And the punishment for disobeying orders is
death.
I have to say THe The Kill Club is one of the best thrillers I have read in 2019. It's a hard one to review without giving away key plot points. The story is told through multiple points of view with the main focus on Jazz. Jazz is just trying to figure out how to get her foster brother out of the clutches of their religious fanatic foster mother. She is approached with a tempting opportunity that could solve all of her problems. But, it comes at a cost that she isn't sure she is willing to pay. The use of multiple view points really worked for the story. It helped move the plot along while giving away key information just at the right pace. If you are looking for a fast paced thriller with several twists and a chilling ending, I highly recommend this one.
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I have to say THe The Kill Club is one of the best thrillers I have read in 2019. It's a hard one to review without giving away key plot points. The story is told through multiple points of view with the main focus on Jazz. Jazz is just trying to figure out how to get her foster brother out of the clutches of their religious fanatic foster mother. She is approached with a tempting opportunity that could solve all of her problems. But, it comes at a cost that she isn't sure she is willing to pay. The use of multiple view points really worked for the story. It helped move the plot along while giving away key information just at the right pace. If you are looking for a fast paced thriller with several twists and a chilling ending, I highly recommend this one.
Enjoy this excerpt:
THE CEILING ABOVE the crowd sparkles with strings of golden
lights. They twinkle just bright enough to illuminate the faces. I adjust a
microscopic issue with my toms and run my fingers through my bangs,
straightening them over my eyes. The guys are tuning up, creating a clatter of
discordant notes in the monitors. When they’re done, they approach my kit for
our usual last-minute debate about the set list. Dao humps his bass in his
ready-to-play dance, black hair swishing around his shoulders. “Dude, stop,”
Matt groans and readjusts the cable that connects his Telecaster to his pedal
board.
“Your
mom loves my dancing,” Dao says.
“You dance like Napoleon Dynamite,”
Matt retorts.
“Your mom dances like Napoleon
Dynamite.”
Andre raises his hands. “Y’all both
dance like Napoleon Dynamite, and so do both your moms, so let’s just—”
I wave a stick at them. “Guys.
Focus. The sound guy is watching. We’re three minutes behind.” I have no
patience for this shit tonight. This all feels extra and stupid. I should be
doing something to help Joaquin. His dwindling supply of insulin sits at the
front of my brain like a ticking clock.
The guys get into their spots, the
distance between them set by muscle memory. Andre leans forward into the mic
and drawls, “Arright DTLA, lez get a little dirty in here.” His New Orleans
accent trickles off his tongue like honey.
The room inhales, anticipates, a
sphere of silence.
“Two three four,” I yell. I clack
my sticks together and we let loose, four on the floor and loud as hell. I’m hitting
hard tonight. It feels great. I need to hit things. My heart beats in tempo. My
arms fly through the air, the impact of the drums sharp in my joints, in my
muscles, the kick drum a pulse keeping the audience alive. This is what I love
about drumming, this forcing of myself into the crowd, making their hearts
pound in time to my beat.
Dao fucks up the bridge of “Down
With Me” and Andre gives him some vicious side-eye. The crowd is pressed tight
up against the stage. A pair of hipsters in cowboy hats grabs a corresponding
pair of girls and starts dancing with them. I cast Dao an eye-rolling look
referring to the cowboy hats and he wiggles his eyebrows at me. I stomp my kick
drum harder, pretending it’s Carol’s face.
The crowd surges back. Arms fly. A
guy in the front staggers, falls. A pair of hands grips the stage, and a girl
tries to pull herself up onto it.
Matt and Dao stop playing. The
music screeches to a halt.
“What’s going on?” I yell.
“Something in the pit,” Dao calls
back.
Andre drops his mic and hops down
into the crowd. Dao and Matt cast their instruments aside and close the
distance to the edge of the stage. I get up and join them. Together, we look
down into the pit.
A clearing has formed around a
brown-haired guy lying on the floor. Andre and the bouncer squat by him as he
squirms and thrashes, his arms and legs a tangle of movement. Andre’s got his
phone pressed to his ear and is talking into it urgently. The bouncer is trying
to hold the flailing man still, but the man’s body is rigid, shuddering out of
the bouncer’s grip. He flops onto his back, and I get a good look at his face.
Oh, shit, I know this guy. He’s a
regular at our shows. He whines and pants, muffled words gargling from his
throat. Some of the bystanders have their phones out and are recording this.
Assholes.
The man shrieks like a bird of
prey. The crowd sucks its whispers back into itself, and the air hangs heavy
and hushed under the ceiling twinkle lights.
Andre is still talking into his
phone. The bouncer lifts helpless hands over the seizing man, obviously not
sure what to do.
I should see if Andre wants help. I
hop down off the stage and push through the crowd. “Excuse me. Can you let me
through? Can you stop recording this and let me through?”
I’m suddenly face-to-face with a
man who is trying to get out of the crowd as hard as I’m trying to get into it.
His face is red and sweaty, his eyes wild. “Move,” he orders me.
Dick. “You fucking move.”
“Bitch, move.” He slams me with his
shoulder, knocking me into a pair of girls who cry out in protest. I spin, full
of rage, and reverse direction to follow him.
“Hey, fucker,” I scream. He casts a
glance over his shoulder. “Yeah, you! Get the fuck back here!”
He escalates his mission to get out
of the crowd, elbowing people out of his way twice as fast. I’m smaller and
faster, and I slip through the opening he leaves in his wake. Just before he
makes it to the side exit, I grab his flannel shirt and give him a hard yank
backward. “Get the fuck back here!” I’m loose, all the rage and pain from
earlier channeling into my hatred for this entitled, pompous asshole.
I know I should rein it in, but he
spins to face me and says, “What is your problem, bitch?” And that’s it. I haul
back and punch him full in the jaw.
He stumbles, trips over someone’s
foot and lands on his ass on the cement floor. His phone goes clattering out of
his hand, skidding to a stop by someone’s foot. “The hell!”
“Oh, shit,” cries a nearby guy in a
delighted voice.
“Fucking bitch,” the guy says, and this is the last time he’s calling me a
bitch. I go down on top of him, a knee in his chest. I swing wild, hit him in
the jaw, the forehead, the neck. He throws an elbow; it catches me in the boob
and I flop back off him with a grunt of pain. He sits up, a hand on his face,
and opens his mouth to say something, but I launch myself off the ground again,
half-conscious of a chorus of whoops and howls around us. I throw a solid
punch. His nose cracks. Satisfaction. I almost smile. Blood streams down his
face.
“That’s what you get,” I pant. He
crab-shuffles back, pushes off the ground and sprints for the exit. I let him
go.
My chest is heaving, and I have the
guy’s blood on my hand, which is already starting to ache and swell. I wipe my
knuckles on my jeans.
His phone lights up and starts
buzzing on the floor. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand. It’s an old
flip phone, the kind I haven’t seen in years. The bright green display says Blocked.
Back in the pit, the man having a
seizure shrieks again, and then his screams gurgle to a stop. I put the phone
in my pocket and push through the onlookers. I watch as his back convulses like
he’s going to throw up, and then he goes limp. A thin river of blood snakes out
of his open mouth and trails along the cement floor.
The room echoes with silence where
the screams had been. A trio of girls stands motionless, eyes huge, hands
pressed to mouths.
The flip phone in my pocket buzzes.
I pull it out, snap it open and press it to my ear. “Hello?”
A pause.
“Hello?” I repeat.
A click. The line goes dead.
A set of paramedics slams the stage
door open, stretcher between them. “Coming through!” They kneel down and start
prodding at the man curled up on the concrete. His head flops back. His eyes
are stretched wide and unseeing, focused on some point far beyond the twinkling
ceiling lights.
Next to him on the concrete lies
something… What is it? It’s rectangular and has red and—
It’s a playing card.
Excerpted from The Kill Club by Wendy Heard, Copyright © 2019 by Wendy Heard. Published by MIRA Books.
Author
Bio:
Wendy Heard, author of Hunting Annabelle, was born in San Francisco and has lived most of her life in Los Angeles. When not writing, she can be found hiking the Griffith Park trails, taking the Metro and then questioning this decision, and haunting local bookstores.
Wendy Heard, author of Hunting Annabelle, was born in San Francisco and has lived most of her life in Los Angeles. When not writing, she can be found hiking the Griffith Park trails, taking the Metro and then questioning this decision, and haunting local bookstores.
Social
Links:
Twitter: @wendydheard
Instagram: @wendydheard
Facebook: @wendydheard
