Kill Code by Clive Fleury

The Synopsis:

It’s the year 2031. Our future. Their present. A world decimated by climate catastrophe, where the sun’s heat is deadly and the ocean rises higher every day. A world ruled by the rich, powerful, and corrupt. A world where a good man can’t survive for long.
Hogan Duran was a good man once. He was a cop, forced to resign in disgrace when he couldn’t save his partner from a bullet. Now Hogan lives on the fraying edges of society, serving cruel masters and scavenging trash dumps just to survive.
But after four years of living in poverty, Hogan finally gets a chance to get back on his feet. He’s invited to join the National Security Council, the powerful paramilitary organization responsible for protecting the rich and powerful from the more unsavory elements of society. All he needs to do is pass their deadly entrance exam, and he’ll be rewarded with wealth and opportunity beyond his wildest dreams.
But this ex-cop’s path to redemption won’t be easy. The NSC are hiding something, and as Hogan descends deeper and deeper into their world, he starts to uncover the terrible truth of how the powerful in this new world maintain their power…and just how far they will go to protect their secrets.
In a world gone wrong, can one man actually make a difference, or will he die trying?
Fans of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey, and Divergent by Veronica Roth will be captivated by Kill Code.

I received this book from the author for the purpose of this review. All comments and opinions are entirely my own.

Review:

While I can see why Kill Code has been compared to popular novels such as The Hunger Games, The 5th Wave, and Divergent, I hate to admit that this action-packed adventure is a little disappointing based on those comparisons.

Being a fan of the Divergent series and having read the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy, I have to be honest that I feel like this comparison is in place more for clickbait than actual similarity. The only thing I found in common between them is that there is a “survival of the fittest” storyline and a corrupt government, which is literally the genre of Dystopian–not those books specifically. The most important difference is that Kill Code is an adult Dystopian series, whereas the others are YA, which alone gives it an entirely different mood.

Taking away the comparison, however, and analyzing the book by itself, it was an okay book. I’m still confused about a lot of things and the pace was far too fast in my opinion, but I was interested enough to finish Kill Code and never grew bored of the story. It had a good plot twist that I hadn’t been expecting, but the ending needed about fifty more pages, at least, to explain more what was going on and create believable reasons for why the characters changed their whole endgame. As it is now, the first half of the book is great, the ending is “meh”.

The main character, Hogan, is a fascinating guy, but for the book to be told in first person by him, I’m surprised that I really don’t know all that much about him. The author never really slowed down to let the readers feel any of Hogan’s emotions or hear his thoughts or allowed him to express his passions and desires. He acted certain ways in situations, but we never knew why. Hogan just told his story without that element of depth that I had hoped to see.

Now the action and puzzling aspects of the story were certainly not lacking! There is a good deal of military-inspired suspense and combat scenes, as well as plenty of gory and unfortunate deaths for some characters. You’ll encounter your fair share of explosions too, and I certainly can’t forget to mention the biker gang and their glorious bikes. Believe me, you won’t be missing out on any action, there’s plenty of it there!

The last thing I do want to mention is that there is a good deal of cursing and several scenes that mention nudity. There’s no sexual meaning behind these scenes, just certain parts of the story (I’m being vague so as to not give away spoilers) require the groups of characters to be naked in the same room (e.g. military health inspections), though the rooms do contain both male and females and our male character does mention looking around and mentions a female’s breasts later on in the book. There is no romance however, not even a kiss between any characters, and there are no descriptions about the nudity in any sort of detail beyond “he took off his clothes”. So just be aware of that and make your own judgement on if this book is for you.

Overall, I would have liked to see Kill Code more detailed about Hogan’s life and personality, I’d like to have seen some more details to the story and perhaps not such a quickly resolved ending. I give it 2 out of 5 stars and though I wouldn’t tell anyone not to read it, it’s not exactly a book that I would recommend to my friends.