I was really looking forward to this book. I do love my mysteries and thrillers, and this sounded right up my alley. I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting, but it wasn’t what the book ended up being. I don’t mean that in a bad way, it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

The book begins with someone getting shot and someone asking “What have we done?” before jumping forward a few years. The first three chapters in the book are dedicated to our three main characters – Jenna, Donnie and Nico. Jenna is a suburban housewife who we learn has recently married a man who has two daughters from a previous marriage (his wife passed away). The teen daughter hates her (as we would expect), but she’s happy. That is, until she gets a text from a random number saying that they can’t wait to see her at the gym. She hadn’t planned to go to the gym that day, but something draws her there and that is when she is given a duffle bag with a disguise and a sniper rifle and a target. Oh, snap – Jenna used to be an assassin. This I loved. I have this thing for tough women who are actually spies or assassins. I used to love the TV show Alias. Anyway – the assassination attempt goes south and Jenna soon realizes it was a setup and she was the one whom was to be assassinated.

Donnie is a washed up rocker who spends more time parting than playing music. He and his band are now reliving their glory days on a cruise ship, but Donnie’s partying has gotten the best of him and he is moments away from being kicked out of the band. Too bad some woman forces him to jump off the side of the boat before that can happen.

Nico is a reality TV producer. He is summoned to a mine where he is filming his hit TV show, when some woman shows up and sets off an explosion that traps him in the mine.

While all three of our main characters survive the initial attempt on their lives, they eventually find their way back into each other’s lives when they return to the crappy town where they lived together in a youth house. They had all been involved in something when they lived here that resulted in someone wanting them dead – but why?

I, for sure, thought when I read the synopsis that they had accidentally killed another kid who lived with them and either they survived and came back for revenge, or someone saw and is now after them for money – if you got all excited and want to read the book because you, too, thought that was where things were going – let em save you some time. That is not the outcome. Honestly, I was okay with that because that story has been told in many, many 80s horror flicks and it’s kind of tired. Honestly, I was okay with the reveal – it had crossed my mind at one time, but I tossed it aside, so it was a nice little surprise. The problem for me was the book felt a little uneven both in the pacing and in the characters.

Most of the story takes place in real time as we switch between Jenna, Donnie and Nico’s points of view, but then we also get some flashbacks to when they were kids. Later in the book, we also get another point of view of the assassins out to get our three friends, which kind of ruined the mystery a bit – this felt unnecessary.

I also didn’t feel much of a connection between the three main characters, and I honestly wanted more of the story from when they were younger.

In a nutshell, I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t love it. There were elements that really worked for me, but in the end it felt like there was too much thrown into the overall story and it muddied it up too much. It kind of felt like a Ryan Murphy show – there were too many characters and not enough substance.