Kill Shot by Vince Flynn

          Mitch Rapp #2

          Kill Shot is not my usual kind of book – spies, assassins and terrorists are not really my thing. This is not a book I would read again, not because there is anything wrong with it; it is just not to my taste.

          Kill Shot is well written and fast paced. The main characters are easy to differentiate and remember. My only issue is that one guy’s first name is Stan and another’s last is Stanfield.  And, as is normal with this kind of book, characters are referred to by first and last names interchangeably. This took me a couple of chapters to get lined up correctly in my head.

          There was a little too much blood and gore for my taste and too little remorse for the taking of life – even scum sucking terrorist life should not be taken emotionlessly. However, the “good guy” (AKA Mitch Rapp, CIA assassin) was an efficient killer. The bad guys were all trigger happy idiots, but that did make it easy to tell the good from the bad.

          The story centers on Mitch Rapp, a CIA operative based in Paris. He has been given a list of targets he is supposed to kill one after another. This story gets started as Mitch enters a Paris hotel room with the intention of doing away with a Libyan official.  Rapp is met by a hit squad of Islamic terrorists spraying the room with bullets. Rapp manages to complete his assigned kill then kills four of the five member hit squad. He escapes the hotel with one minor bullet wound which he dresses himself squatting under a stone bridge support.

          The French police are left with a mess and a mystery created when the French version of the CIA comes in to tamper with the evidence. Rapp walks away from the incident convinced there is leak within the CIA and he has been compromised.

          The rest of the story involves bringing Mitch in after the debacle, running down the source of the leak at the CIA and finally torturing and killing Mitch’s nemesis within the agency.

          This is most definitely a “boy book” and I am not a boy.  However, it is well written enough that I won’t mind reading others in the series as they come along. And, I’m definitely recommending this one to my husband.