3 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

At the age of ten, Mia Corvere witnesses her first execution. It is a moment that will change her life and her destiny forever. The desire to have retribution against those who slighted her family burns fiercely within her.

To do so she must embrace that fury and become a weapon without equal. She decides that she must join the Red Church of Itreya and become one of their very best assassins. However, surviving a building full of murderers is going to take some doing…

Her and her fellow acolytes’ training is intense, bloody, brutal and relentless. She makes friends with some of them, others she is ambivalent about, and there are others that will become enemies for life…

The training covers every method that they can think of for killing people, but the Red Church has another range of methods of death that their imaginations have not even considered yet.
Not every acolyte will make it to the end of the course and be in the final selection. The rate of attrition is high for failure, and they have to be aware that things that they have recently learnt will be used against them. She doesn’t know if any of her friends will be there at the end, let alone if she has enough mental strength to pass the course.

It is a fast-paced and thrilling ride. There were parts of this book that I liked, the imagination it takes to come up with this assassin’s church and the world-building I particularly liked. The plot is half decent, too. I could predict some of the outcomes, main character, first book in a series, etc, etc, but not the journey that he drapes around the characters, to the ending. There were parts I wasn’t that keen on, it is incredibly violent, so might not be for everyone. He is also keen on info dumps, and I thought that these got in the way of the plot sometimes. Most annoying were the footnotes; I’ve grown up reading Pratchett, who was a master at them, but Kristoff’s were huge and, in my opinion, mostly unnecessary. So overall, not bad, but I’ll probably not bother to read the rest in the series.

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