Book: The Murder Complex by Lindsay Cummings

Published June 2014 by HarperCollins|275 pages

Where I Got It: Own the e-book

Series: The Murder Complex #1

Genre: YA Dystopic

What It’s About:

An action-packed, blood-soaked, futuristic debut thriller set in a world where the murder rate is higher than the birthrate. For fans of Moira Young’s Dust Lands series, La Femme Nikita, and the movie Hanna.

Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.

The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?

Action-packed, blood-soaked, and chilling, this is a dark and compelling debut novel by Lindsay Cummings.

What I Thought:

I was super-excited about this book when I first heard about it, but I didn’t like it!  I honestly thought it was really confusing, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

The actual Murder Complex isn’t explained until later in the book, and everything is so convoluted and complicated that I really couldn’t tell you at what point it’s mentioned, much less actually explained.

There’s just no context for what anything means, because nothing is explained.  You see terminology like The Dark Times and the Silent Hour and Creds, and none of it makes sense because (or very little sense) because there isn’t any context for it. There’s no history, and as far I can remember, there’s no explanation for why they’re in a walled city, and why the murder rate is so high, and why there are programmed assassins.

I have no sense of where this particular place is, how they got to this point, and the characters are forgettable- they both sounded the same to me, especially in the beginning.  It seems like survival is really important, and considering the fact that Meadow was trained by her dad to kill and survive, and yet she seems really naive to have survived so long in this world.

It definitely seems like Cummings really know the world of the Murder Complex, and while I am intrigued by the idea, I just felt like nothing was really explained.  It was just a lot different than what I expected, based on the summary, and it wasn’t until the end of the book when we got a hint of the book I was expecting.  At that point, though, I just didn’t care, and it was a little too late.

My Rating: 

2 stars.  While I didn’t like the book overall, the idea does have promise, but was more complicated than it needed to be.