The Game (Victor the Assassin #3) ★★★☆☆

 

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Title: The Game
Series: Victor the Assassin #3
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 405
Words: 115K

Victor, now working for the CIA, kills a fellow assassin, who had taken out an American. Can’t let that kind of behavior stand, so Victor does the deed. Only for the CIA to find out that this merc had been recruited to pull off a “big job” and without him, they have zero leads. So Victor has to pretend to be the merc and find out what’s going on and to stop it if necessary. We get a new CIA liaison for Victor and I must say, she was simply incompetent and improbable. Every time she meets up with Victor she’s all worried about him and bemoaning that she placed him in “such a dangerous situation”. I think the author was trying to show that she wasn’t a ruthless scumbag like Victor’s previous handler, but man, it came across the wrong way.

So Victor has to join a group of mercs but he doesn’t know what the job entails. It gets to the point where he’s about to walk out the door because of the lack of details and suddenly the criminal mastermind reveals that he has kidnapped a woman and child who he thinks are Victor’s (as he is pretending to be another man), so as to blackmail him. As soon as Victor didn’t kill everyone, I knew where this was going and once another mercenary was killed by the top mercenary, I knew where THAT was going. Everything turns into an electric boogaloo doublecross, only Victor goes all noble and saves the wife and kid. And the big bad plot? To kill a russian security officer. It was kind of disappointing that it wasn’t a nuke, or a plague or something!

So nothing bad here, just a mundane action/adventure story. I think that’s how the whole series is going to be and so I need to adjust my expectations accordingly.

★★★☆☆

• The Killer (Book 1)

• The Enemy (Book 2)