Review: Every Deadly Kiss

Every Deadly Kiss by Steven James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another story with Patrick Bowers, though this one, the tenth overall, challenges expectations with its unusual blend of two major story arcs - one involving a former child star turned FBI agent (and her horrifying backstory - you'll probably never look at any child star the same way again after reading this book!), the other, a fairly reluctant jihadist, one who doesn't 100% subscribe to the same warped ideology as do his comrades, and armed with a very deadly, and very unique, weapon indeed. Set between Every Crooked Path and The Pawn - and with an ending implying at least one more good story in that in between - Every Deadly Kiss, like its immediate predecessor, benefits from James' use of a floating timeline. You'd expect this book to take place sometime in the late 90s to early 2000s (that is, if the original Bowers Files series takes place roughly around the times the books came out), but James adorns this story with the high-tech nature you expect in a story of this decade, heavy on social media apps (clearly modeled on the likes of Tinder and Snapchat in particular) and even tinges of biopunk with the big terror plot. And as with all of the other novels to date in the Bowers Files, James gives us such a blazing fast plot that well over 500 pages read all too quickly. Seriously, why aren't more people reading these books? They're some of the most underrated crime stories out there. Dark but not excessively so, and adrenaline-pumping like nobody's business.

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