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A review by abookwormwithwine
The Killing Lessons by Saul Black
4.0
Holy dark and gritty novel!! I don't know what I thought I was going to get when I started [b:The Killing Lessons|23848102|The Killing Lessons (Valerie Hart, #1)|Saul Black|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1429101816l/23848102._SY75_.jpg|40617224] by [a:Saul Black|8004236|Saul Black|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1439998941p2/8004236.jpg], but I definitely wasn't expecting it to be so intense. There is so much descriptive violence and gore, and there is NO way you should read it unless you are okay with both of those things. There are a lot of viewpoint changes and a lot of characters as well, but somehow, I mostly kept them all straight and didn't find myself confused. Even though this series features Valerie Hart as our main character, I didn't feel like her viewpoint got way more attention than anyone else. Some character's POVs don't show up as often and Hart is still definitely the main POV, but I thought Black did a great job of giving the other characters attention, so this wasn't just a straight-up police procedural. Thanks to all of the viewpoints, as the reader we are omniscient and know everything that is happening so the killer isn't really a surprise to anyone but Hart our homicide detective. I don't always love when authors choose to do this, but I thought it worked really well for this book.
I thought the audiobook for The Killing Lessons was very interesting, and it is narrated by Christina Delaine. I chose the word interesting because I can't really think of a better word to describe it. The way Delaine narrates is almost at a certain tempo, and I am very curious to know if the author or publisher directed her to do this or if that was her interpretation of the writing style. Either way, I was a big fan of it, and it gave the book a different kind of feel than I would have gotten from reading it - in a good way! My first impression of Hart was that she has a lot of guilt from not being able to solve a previous crime and it was doing a lot to her psyche. She grapples with a couple of things throughout the novel and I will be very interested to see where the rest of the series takes us with her character. This is a pretty long book and the audio was a whopping 14 hours and 39 minutes. I think The Killing Lessons dragged a bit at times and other times it was nonstop action, so maybe it could have been whittled down a bit. But for a debut, this was really impressive, and I am IN for every book to come!
I thought the audiobook for The Killing Lessons was very interesting, and it is narrated by Christina Delaine. I chose the word interesting because I can't really think of a better word to describe it. The way Delaine narrates is almost at a certain tempo, and I am very curious to know if the author or publisher directed her to do this or if that was her interpretation of the writing style. Either way, I was a big fan of it, and it gave the book a different kind of feel than I would have gotten from reading it - in a good way! My first impression of Hart was that she has a lot of guilt from not being able to solve a previous crime and it was doing a lot to her psyche. She grapples with a couple of things throughout the novel and I will be very interested to see where the rest of the series takes us with her character. This is a pretty long book and the audio was a whopping 14 hours and 39 minutes. I think The Killing Lessons dragged a bit at times and other times it was nonstop action, so maybe it could have been whittled down a bit. But for a debut, this was really impressive, and I am IN for every book to come!