Rating: WARTY!
After a prison break in a small town, during which masses of convicts get loose and ransack the place, literally raping and pillaging, two years pass and not a single one of the dirty dozen escape planners has been caught. Abusing grant money aimed at rebuilding the town, local police detective Leah Hawkins, with the sanction of several town leaders. is commissioned to go after those men, not to bring them in, but to execute them. Therein lies the problem. Since those idiots at Kirkus called this book 'superior', I should have avoided it like the plague, but I didn't know their opinion at the time, so I gave it the old escapee try, and it fell short. There was too much luck and too many improbable in it. The more I read, the more it took my suspension of disbelieve and mangled it.
I'd been hoping for better, since the main character seemed like she might be interesting. She wasn't. Worse, she was boring. The biggest problem she had was that there was no problem that she had. Everything went her way all the time and never was she in any real danger or any kind of jeopardy. Despite the apparent dismal failure of the FBI to get a handle on even a single one of these dozen escapees in two years, Leah was able to track the first one down in no time at all - living in his mom's old house. Seriously? The FBI didn't watch the place? The same thing happened with escapees 2 and 3. They were found hanging out with friends or relatives who were known to the police. No one checked these places? The FBI didn't watch them?
One of these friends operated a fake ID factory, and Leah was lucky enough to discover a trash bin that apparently had not been emptied in two years and therefore had new names with old faces on driver's licenses and so on, leading Leah to a California location where she was able to get three of them in one fell swoop. Seriously? An illegal operation not once emptied-out incriminating trash in two years? Bullshit. Never did this executor Leah call out to these guys and offer them a chance to surrender. Never did she alert other cops or the FBI to their location si they could be brought to justice. Never once was she drawn-on first, and forced to shoot to defend herself. Time after time, she simply and cold-bloodedly murdered them, despite there being nothing in her history to suggest she would be that kind of person, nor was there any real triggering event which set her on the road to becoming a serial killer. And in the end she paid no price for her own crimes.
It was too much to take seriously. I can't commend this book at all.
