Rating: 4/5
Review:
Enjoyable and exciting
This is a very enjoyable load of old hokum. It could be utterly dreadful – a ruthless,
beautiful highly trained female assassin (the eponymous Villanelle) working for
a shadowy group of ultra-rich people protecting their own interests isn't exactly
a fresh-sounding set-up - but it's well done and actually very entertaining.
I've largely summarized the plot in the last sentence, but
we also meet a British intelligence operative whose mission it is to catch and
kill Villanelle. She is a rather
engaging character: brilliant and determined but unglamorous and ordinary in
her personal life, she makes a good foil to Villanelle's character, and I like
that the two chief protagonists are both women.
Luke Jennings writes well, presents a good, detailed background and
creates pretty believable scenes and characters - within the overall
implausibility of the whole thing, of course.
He structures the plot well and I found it an exciting and easy read.
I did think that a couple of the sex scenes were
gratuitously explicit – especially one in which a potential target for
Villanelle visits a brothel and indulges in some, shall we say, very niche
practices which were described in needlessly graphically detail. Also, this is the set up for at least one
more book; there is no real resolution at the end and I'm not sure that the
idea will carry a series. Nonetheless, I
did enjoy Codename Villanelle and I will look out for the sequel. Recommended.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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