End As An Assassin by Lex Lander

I have received a free advance PDF copy of the book “End As An Assassin” by Lex Lander to review. This is the first book in the Manhunter series.

Here is the book blurb.

This time it’s not for money.
This time it’s for blood, pure and simple.

André Warner is a professional killer, ex-British Secret Service. Thirty-nine contracts have made him a wealthy man, and his fortieth is to be his last.

The hit goes smoothly enough, and the victim – a degenerate drug baron – is dispatched with minimal fuss and no traces left to incriminate Warner. He drives off into the sunrise to hang up his gun and retire to his home in Geneva.

Then into his life comes Gina, a hauntingly beautiful divorcee, fugitive from a bad marriage. The timing is perfect, coinciding as it does with Warner’s new beginning. They soon become lovers, and all seems set fair for a life together.

Their idyll is shattered when a former associate turns against Warner, and he faces exposure and arrest. Accompanied by Gina, he flees his Geneva home, only to run from the clutches of the Swiss police into the far deadlier embrace of a Marseilles crime syndicate whose boss has a score to settle on behalf of Warner’s last victim. Suddenly Gina is at risk through her association with him, and in trying to protect her he only makes matters worse.

His retirement plans in shreds, his life on the line, Warner is forced to stage a comeback. Only this time it’s not for money. It’s for blood, pure and simple.

This story is the opposite to most in that André, the lead character is an assassin rather than a typical good guy hero. The book starts by setting the scene with André’s fortieth contract killing of Tillou, which at face value appears to have gone smoothly. Having now earned buckets of money from being an assassin, he retires at only age 38.

Six months later, bored in retirement, André heads south from his Geneva home to his yacht in Monaco. But he thinks a car and a motorbike are tracking him. At this point, I started to identify with him as the hero of the story, even though he is a bad guy really. Also you build a picture of how he views women as sexual encounters, not for relationships, that is until he falls for Gina.

Meanwhile the tracking escalates into attacks and André decides to draw the attackers out by returning to Geneva. However the first people to turn up on his doorstep are the police and they appear to have linked him to his last contract killing. A few days later this is followed by a phone call from Bonhomme, the man who paid André to carry out that killing. Shortly afterwards Gina arrives in Geneva. André discovers from Bonhomme that Tillou’s father knows he was the killer and wants revenge. The attacks have been from his henchmen.

I won’t say any more except to let you know there are plenty of twists. This story certainly kept me turning the pages and the nearer I got to finishing the book, the more I was beginning to wonder how the story would end. However I did find the ending rather abrupt. Not sure if this is due to it being the first book in a series. And I also had a few unanswered questions, which I can’t detail here, as they could spoil it for you.

End As An Assassin is newly available on Amazon, currently priced at £3.99 on Kindle and is published by Kaybec Publishing. I loved it and highly recommend it, Looking forward to the next book in the Manhunter series.

This is Lex’s second novel. His first book is Another Day Another Jackal, a political thriller.

I’m participating in the book tour and you may like to check out some of the other blog stops on the tour.

And look out this afternoon for a guest post on my blog by Lex.

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Disclosure.  This post is a review of an e-book I was sent for free.  All opinions are my own.