Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

          I just finished Gone Girl. And, I've got to say, Wow! What an imagination! As a reader, I am regularly impressed by the imaginative powers of authors. But I am awe struck by Ms. Flynn's - very complex, very devious, positively enthralling.

          Every marriage has its ups and downs. Every spouse gets angry with their partner. Some spouses act on their angry feelings. Nick and Amy Dunne take this to unprecedented levels. They make it an art form.

          Amy Dunne disappears on the afternoon of her and Nick’s fifth wedding anniversary. The front door is standing open when Nick comes home and there are signs of a struggle in the house. Naturally, the police look at the husband first. They always do. Nick’s story does not quite add up and some of the evidence looks staged. And, once the police home in on Nick, they cease to look anywhere else.  Weeks pass without Amy’s body being found. I’d love to tell you more, but do not want to give any of the good stuff away. 
  
           The story is told from both Amy’s and Nick’s points of view. The voices alternate each chapter.  We see how the two of them met and fell in love. We are given an insider’s view of how they married and each fell out of love. We see how each of them reacted to the crumbling of the marriage.  And we see how all those puzzle pieces fitted together culminate in the events of the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary.

          This is the story of a marriage between two of the sickest, most twisted people imaginable. I loved it. I’m having a tough time describing the story without any spoilers.  It is too good to give away any of the juicy details.  You have simply GOT to read it for yourself. I insist!

 

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.