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Title: The Darkest Day
Series: Victor the Assassin #5
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 293
Words: 90K
Ol’ Victorewsky is hired to whack an arms dealer. Only it turns into an ambush and Victor is almost killed by another assassin. The CIA operative who set up the original hit lets Victor know the other assassin is a rogue agent and one of the best. Victor sets out on her trail and in the process sets himself up as a dupe in a potential terrorist attack by the aforementioned CIA operative. Victor and Miss Assassin ally and take down a group of special forces who are going to use a dirty nuke in New York City. They give the evidence to Victor’s handler so everything is ship shape. Then Miss Assassin tries to hook up with Victor, because being an assassin is lonely business. And Victor kills her because she knows too much about him. Ohhhhhhh, snap!
I was enjoying the first part of this book immensely. Victor almost getting offed and realizing there is somebody else as good as him was great. But once he hits NYC and hooks up with Miss Assassin, it all went to the crapper. Most of that is because Victor gets chased through the city and the cops keep finding him. Now, that doesn’t sound so bad does it? BUT! There is a blackout. There is a massive rainstorm. Everybody is stuck on the road because of the blackout. And the flipping cops keep finding Victor like he’s the prize in a box of cracker jax. It was just too much for me. NYC, even just the part that is Manhattan Island, is too big and busy for cops to find one guy in those circumstances. It was like Woods was treating NYC like some little sleepy one street European town. While I avoid big cities, I’ve been in a couple (and never want to do it again if I can help it) and the thought of the cops being able to find me at the drop of a hat is just ludicrous.
So that really took down my enjoyment. A lot. To the point where I was thinking about giving this 2 stars. But then the ending redeemed it when Victor shows what an absolute psychopath loner he is. It made me say outloud, “Oh, that is BRUTAL!” But it was consistent with how he had lived his entire life and it wouldn’t have made sense at all for Victor to get romantically involved with another assassin who could identify him. This series has been consistently good and I am glad Wood (the author) didn’t skimp here and try to make Victor some sort of “relatable” guy. He’s a successful assassin, period.
★★★☆☆
Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road 
Is Victor a thrilling antihero?
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I like him. So I guess so, as most of the time antihero aren’t my thing
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Of course, you can’t trust covers. That’s why trusted reviewers like myself wield such massive amounts of social power.
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So is Victor in competition with MissAssassassassin or are they working together?
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He starts out as competition, then they work together, THEN he kills her.
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That sounds like the way a professional would handle things.
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Exactly. Victor is nothing if not professional.
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She’s not yet dead at the end though!
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Dang, didn’t even consider that but you are right.
And a body’s not dead until its buried.
This opens up new vistas…
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*waggles eyebrows*.
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ooohhhh my….
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A lack of believable circumstances can indeed spoil the enjoyment of a story. Even in speculative fiction we need some *logical* grounds for a novel to work, and that’s even more true in action/adventure….
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Yep, things need to be internally consistent or it can really grate….
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dont you just love the old assassin love novels?
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Hahaha 🙂
It really warms my heart ❤️
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Love does strange things to us all, including assassins. This does sound like a rollercoaster of a read, but intriguing nonetheless.
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I’m really enjoying the series so far. Assassins and all 🙂
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Yeh, it’s funny how finding a specific criminal in NYC seems so easy. I just assume that it’s a numbers game: so many cops in the streets, someone is bound to call out something fishy and get the detectives there in the blink of an eye.
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The power outage n rain storm pushed it into silly territory. Like he was playing Where’s Waldo.
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