Review: “Right to Kill,” Andrew Peterson

Pros: More action than any five other books
Cons: Anything non-action tends to be not-good
Rating: 3 out of 5

Right to Kill, by Andrew Peterson, is part of his Nathan McBride Series. We’re dealing with ex-soldiers returned from overseas who work a hugely successful security firm while still working together with some of their old cronies in the CIA. In this case, an old team member, Linda Genneken, is in need of help. She lives close by to Nathan, who installed her state-of-the-art alarm system himself. The infiltration team knows how to handle most of the alarm system, but they missed a part. Linda is woken up by her system, and it sends a wake-up call to Nate as well. He and another old comrade, Harv, book it toward Linda’s house, hoping desperately to get there in time.

The battle at Linda’s house is incredible. It’s sustained, complex, and absorbing. It quickly becomes clear that they want to capture Linda, not kill her. Luckily she has the same war-time experience as Nathan and Harv, and does an incredible amount of damage before they can even get to her (and her husband). After her reinforcements arrive, the battle continues to swell.

Nearly the entire book consists of battles, and I’m fine with that. They’re wonderfully long, and as a result the book doesn’t actually cover a long time period. The problem it has is that any time it turns to dialogue it becomes a clunker. Thankfully this doesn’t happen often. This includes things like a very experienced warrior saying “Lights out, dirtbag,” before shooting someone (talk about trying to get yourself shot by giving your enemy extra time). Planning gets long and boring since the dialogue is so flat.

I’m put off by the morality of the book. Plenty of bad guys get shot and killed with barely a thought to the morality of it. The only time things get deeply moralistic is when Linda wants to kill a character that higher-ups want alive. So apparently it’s morally okay to shoot people as long as you don’t need them alive for questioning and possible torture. (There was a slight nod here and there to the ‘should we really be killing all these people’ thing, but it wasn’t consistent.)

There’s a plot hole left behind–there are a couple of instances in which it appears that the bad guys have advance knowledge of their plans, locations, and home addresses, but they never speculate or look into the idea that maybe this means they have a mole.

Book provided free by publisher for review