All she has to do is kill a
stranger….
Needless to say this is was one of my
favorite books of the year! This was my first book from Wendy Heard and I am
now obsessed!
First off, I immediate fell in love
with the main character Jazz ! She’s a unique and strong female protagonist
that will stop at nothing to help her brother.
This was such a creative and original
plot line, I had no clue what was about to happen one moment to the next. I
read this book in two days, which is quite fast for me!
If you want a thrill seeking novel
with so many twist and turns, you need this book in your life!
Thank you to Harper Collins for
providing me with an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley. As usual, my
reviews are my honest and unbiased opinions
The Kill Club
Wendy Heard
On Sale Date:
December 17, 2019
9780778309031,
0778309037
Trade
Paperback
$15.99 USD,
$19.99 CAD
Fiction /
Thrillers / Psychological
368 pages
Summary:
A haunting thriller about a woman who attempts to
save her brother's life by making a dangerous pact with a network of vigilantes
who've been hunting down the predators of Los Angeles.
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.
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.
Buy Links:
Social Links:
Twitter: @wendydheard
Instagram: @wendydheard
Facebook: @wendydheardExcerpt
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.
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