Asia Mackay - Killing It

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but flawed

I tried Killing It expecting it to be either fantastically good fun or absolutely terrible.  It was neither; there were plenty of good things about it, but it wasn't great.

Lex Tyler is a new mum who returns to work as an undercover assassin for the British Secret Service, and the book is a comic riff on both action-packed spy adventures and the tribulations of motherhood, with their juxtaposition at the heart of both the comedy and the feminist message.  Asia Mackay writes well in Lex's very readable narrative voice and she creates a good setting for the action.  The spy plot is OK, if a little silly and is reasonably well done, as is the nightmare of Lex having a cover-story which means that, as well as some exciting action, she has to socialise with over-privileged, pretentious and competitive West-London mothers.

I did have some quite serious reservations, though.  The book could have done with a firm editorial hand; at 400 pages it is far too long.  The riffs on the Competitive-Mother setting and Lex's own sense of blundering along messing it up (common to most normal parents, I suspect) are often good but they are too numerous and too protracted so they really get in the way of the story.  Even though I'm wholly in sympathy with the feminist message, it is terribly crudely done at times – especially with the introduction of a caricature sexist pillock of a fellow assassin whom Lex has to confound, which felt so unreal as to weaken the point Mackay is, quite rightly, making.  I also felt uneasy in places about the overall issue of taste.  It is possible to make assassination a subject of some humour if it's done right, but there is a flippancy about torture here which seems to me to be beyond humour in any context.  Mackay oversteps the boundary of acceptability more than once, I think, and I didn't like it

I ended up skimming quite extensively, to be honest, and didn't feel I'd missed all that much.  There are some nice comic moments, like realising that forgetting her maternity bra pads might lead to her leaving DNA at the scene of a covert operation, for example, but overall, I can only give Killing It a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to Zaffre the publishers for an ARC via NetGalley.)