A "Steel Heart" was Not Enough to Make Me Love this Novel

*I won this book through Goodreads' First Reads Giveaway*

I'm sensing a pattern here with assassin books. People 1) like writing/reading about killers and 2) there are usually some flaws when it comes to the execution (pun intended). In this case, the writing spoiled the novel for me because, overall, the story was pretty good. While obvious at times, I enjoyed the drama and suspense that came along with it. EVERYTHING else? Not so much. 

First off, there were entirely too many paragraph breaks and jumping around. The paragraph breaks annoyed me because I thought that we were moving to another point in time, since that's usually what happens, but we'd actually pick up like 5 seconds later. That was a little ridiculous to me. The jumping around was rough too because, while it was interesting to see things happening from multiple POVs, it was extremely abrupt. I would find myself having to recover from the writing whiplash by just putting the book down. 

In addition, the plot moved either way too fast or way too slow. The beginning was slow for me, just because we had to set up everything. However, when the plot picked up, I was surprised to find myself wishing for the buildup that was in the beginning. People were figuring things out too quickly and relationships were developing so fast that it seemed completely unbelievable. This, then, hurt the story because, I was not believing nor invested in a word of it. When you lose that authenticity, then the reader loses interest. Had Jones slowed down a bit and built upon the events he already had in the novel, then he could have made the plot stronger. 

Overall, I have to give Jones credit for self-publishing a book. That is courageous in itself and I respect him for putting out something he believed in. Hopefully my feedback will help him to improve his future books and I wish him luck in all of his endeavors.